Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller

  And you must also know how to give up in the right way. Or to pretend to conquer. To whom should I tell skirt-chasing stories about me and Dísa. Because I lack the goods and travel money to go to Höfn, the stomach, heart, kidney, and interest in engineering. In vain have tried to bring charges relating to the biological warfare I have often been subjected to—to the United Nations. Mr. Tryggvi Lie, the chair there, has not so much as answered my letters. Yet biological warfare is damnable. In this respect, having the free right of complaint is covered under the equal rights in the Human Rights article. This Tryggvi Lie does not exactly have bags under his eyes from worrying about me. Tryggvi probably has eyebags of concern for the skiing in supremacist-crazy Norway. And who would know—unless it was he who ordered the doctors to put germs in my medicine instead of genuine drugs. I DEMAND PURE MEDICINE. I refuse to take medicine full of fish that will swim constantly around my blood vessels and jump waterfalls in my arteries and lagoons of blue veins and swim up and down the salmon run of my heart

  IX. class A

  Tri-×-y poisoned ×

  Dísa is trapped in my brain.

  Poisoned ×, purged myself of mental ×-er of Dísa.

  Let her

  rot from me.

  Respectfully,

  Tómas Jónsson.

  now finally the darkening day moves slowly over me has come halfway to evening as rest invigorates my body I ease my blood pressure carefully in my heart my nerves’ high tension after a day of much energy production I lay myself totally limp my thought bound in the calmness of a cow field gliding through the night pasture the meadow green field not where grass grows but where ideas enter the green colored paintrestthe couple rushed to their door separately after great and hard bickering the tom-toms gibbering no longer in my intoxicated and muddled headI wrote to Dísa of myselfI am emptyI have become oxygenless

  then we come to the arrangement and separation of the various kinds of fear that form the primitive under the heavens’ dome with water and with man’s flesh with the innate execution of your actions and gestures to the creator: fear of authority of weapons of machines then fear of life itself most frequently because it is most linked to man he is covetous and reckoned within the elements of the body the fear of life and he steers people and dwells ever within the flesh and people that part and he is ever connected to the sub-divisions of the mind because all this is fear never one part two- or three-part absolutely must he . . . (here some of the manuscript is missing)

  Here is a simple example of the formation of fear:

  we are not entirely equipped to gloss

  You have become forgetful in your sarcasm, for example, of what you did June 1. Say that it’s necessary for you to remember all the incidents that occurred in late August that year. Your thinking will become (perpetually?) concerned with the forgotten items. Both during sleep and while awake visions will loom over your head the whole month of December (in this case, the vision becomes a gallows). Finally you are able neither to understand nor explain the differences between reflection and image.

  you think in dreams everything

  is natural you come to think up

  many solutions all insoluble

  finally you reach a higher stage

  of human experience, which is

  to not distinguish between fact

  and the desired so the myriad

  mosaics of your mind remotely operated

  a crowd of unrelated words in chaos

  o there comes a man in harmony with terror

  that lives inside and destroys you

  with forgetfulness finally arrives

  that which shall come you are come

  completely out of this world and yourself

  an empty mess Tómess Jónsson join in

  now my Búkolla while you are alive

  An incident never has a reliable outline. Your thinking is no longer material. There are two kinds of memory: assimilated memory, which increases without dissipating, and indexed memory, which increases in order, rather, to keep everything analyzed separately.

  do not read so fast we hardly have a chance to gloss

  some person seizes terror

  she is not able to pull away from

  the webbed card index of memory

  objects and cannot say: here are

  firm memories of horse rides

  over Kjöl here an excellent view over

  the mind’s subdivisions the journey there

  and here white-eyed Lóa and here cannibals

  savages and here difficult teething

  but what she looks around wildly after

  sees no end has lost all environments

  in the existence of fear within the human

  From forgetfulness comes the existence of anxiety and from equally obvious causes and the forgotten situation it takes physical shape in one’s stomach.

  he is everywhere at hand

  is in everything

  is in nothing

  all of us thrown into forgetting

  and we are born only to be forgotten

  Man is the element of life, and anxiety is the element of life and of man. It is the A-Division of the mind that hosts terror. She is housed there one’s whole life long.

  Thus ends the insights of Tómas Jónsson, a lecture 8-22-57.

  Dísapoem, which also could have been written about Miss Gerður, Lóu, or other women from the author’s timeline.

  namely Hell

  neither have I seen your sagging breasts

  nor under the clothes that shelter flesh

  yours are like armor: dress socks

  panties garters and garter belt

  except in Miss Gerður’s mind then

  how you armor your frozen way

  my covetous prayers wish neither

  clothes nor the persistent dismissal of your slipping

  staple—my cunning desires for fleshly relations

  with such an excellent monstress as you are

  here ends the award-winning and acclaimed volume of poetry by Tómas Jónsson

  Finally, we shall look into what we are: a various group of names chosen by our neighbors. Who knows whether the body corresponds to its name. You, Tómas Jónsson, walked from the front door of the house early in the morning and returned in the evening christened with another name: Tómmas. Too much. A man’s name and nature are often two or three contrasts. Earth and man don’t always fall into an embrace (although this may happen among teenagers and old people). Doors and flesh look truth in the eye: the door is eternally a door, flesh is flesh. No one flies away on wings of stone, which the bird casts. No one holds another’s hand like a rosewing. I do not kiss with a nettlekiss. But someone said: behind your back I draw composite images; they are natural. Who was that great fool. Who thought anything was natural.

  probably it would be possible to send them a written eviction notice writing letters to people who live in the same apartment seems beneath Tómas, but not tómmas (now look at that I’m just a hermaphrodite). I am forced to show tenants some human dignity, these uninvited guests who have settled around the apartment and made it their lair. I could take myself overnight to a hotel and write a difficult eviction letter from there without getting black bruises on my conscience.

  Tonight (2-22-54) I dreamed a somewhat puzzling dream: I felt I was headed home. Someone invisible came to me and offered me his company. I see you are nightblind, she said. I considered her offer half comical, since I was a little deserted rock off the coast. In haste, I calculated my geographical position (I thought in every respect the way a deserted rock would in a dream) and felt it would be best to relocate one nautical mile closer to land. Turbulence settled on me. I sailed toward the country and woke up. Here ends this asinine dream.

  Tonight, however, (12-4-54) I saw a deserted rock through my binoculars. The deserted rock was me. On this flat rock nothing grew but bladderwrack. I looked around in all directions from the lighthouse and from the seawe
ed cluster rose a snow-white seal’s head which stared long thoughts at me, its eyes strangely gentle and womanly; then it yawned three times. White foaming crests rose around the skerry. The seal called out to me and said: Please do not simply think of me as a symbol of someone else important to you and your life. Do not be superstitious or a wishful old woman. I’m just a plain old seal with remarkably gentle and womanly eyes. Good, do not take my words too seriously. Everywhere a tomb a mast = Tómmas. And I woke up.

  tenth composition book

  I could declare to the State that I am taking sick leave. Like other folk, I am entitled to paid sick days. In all my working life, I’ve not missed a single day. I often go to work sorely ill. You never get the flu, which is going around, said Miss Gerður, the plague never lays you low. We are each entitled to twelve sick days annually, and most people probably take them, whether they get ill or not; I feel no need to give them to the business, since it gives us nothing, says Sigurður. The morning he got promoted, I am the first to insist that an insolent man got promoted. The branch manager wants to make him more dependent on the business with this appointment. Títa, I put some milk drops in a glass for you. I told the housekeeper not to stir the milk in the coffee, but to leave it in a separate glass. Do you have an empty shot glass, I asked, the milk sours the coffee overnight. No one has undertaken to provide a roof over my head, free; most of my life I have had to struggle for one. Certainly, one makes money on rent, which is necessary so I can pay my mortgage installments on time. Katrín and Sveinn should be out on the street. I need the storage cubby back. I was planning to make toys and sell them at christmas bazaars. I would begin small-scale production of pretty toy cars. I am opposed to big industry, especially heavy industry. I could sell the cars for a decent profit over christmas. Or I could write christmas books. Around these people, there’s barely room to stroke one’s own head. She has filled the storeroom with rubbish. You cannot move for all the boxes and tins, wrenches, spare parts, and oil cans from the American military they bought at the Defense Force Supply Store. We are collecting these things in order to sell them, he says. Somehow you have to support your family. Maintaining family is an eternal dilemma, I answer. It’s a devilish challenge, he says. That’s life for most folk, I reply. When we meet in the hallway he initiates a conversation. The formula for dialogue with Sveinn goes: He says a short sentence. I repeat it in a slightly altered form. These discussions continue until thirty phrases have been spoken, combined (15-15), then Sveinn is drained and sighs: Yes, so it goes. I say: Yes, that’s true. After this great mental exertion he lies down on the couch, crosses his legs, and falls asleep under a military blanket. He is a like a guest in his own home. But his wife stalks bulkily across the floor like she owns each item, each cabinet. She spends her life traveling between the radio and the telephone. I do not know why they have put in a phone, probably so the husband can report that tonight he’s going to work overtime. I never hear her say anything on the phone but this fleeting sentence: I’ll leave a snack on the table for you. Yet she seems to use the phone endlessly. She is constantly ringing out but holds the silent receiver to her ear; very strange behavior. I could believe that Miss Punctuality was one of her friends in this town. If the kid fusses, she gives him the fridge or phone to mess with. He’ll listen to the sound, astonished, and forget to scream. Sveinn’s work clothes hang in the closet, glassy with ointment, instead of hanging on hooks in the laundry room, as I have repeatedly told them: the radio and newspapers have urged people to leave their special work clothes at the workplace. It often occurs to me that we here in the apartment are rapidly approaching middle age. Here there is a kind of reverse development. I would not be surprised if I woke up one morning and ran into Henrik Bjelke in the hallway with a commission from Frederick the Third, King of Denmark and its colony, iceland, to “possess the apartment by law and by right.” I would love to see the expression on the couple’s faces should the home become something other than a place where Sveinn eats, increases his breed, and sleeps off his fatigue from carbonic acid poisoning. Today the house is blissfully free from the electric guitar. Each night the phone rings. I pick the receiver up gently and place it against my ear. I listen breathlessly to the other end of the line. The connection ends, and I stand on the cold floor and spit on the handset. iceland Telecom is apparently the accomplice of these thugs. They refuse to check what number has rung and claim the telecoms laws prohibit that. Now they are checking whether I am at home. Stalking me. The couple would not stir even if I were injured one night. They sleep like cows in a cowshed top-to-tail, heads to feet. Títa would eat my innards, stuffed as they are with steak and soda crackers. When the electric clock on the corner of the watchmaker’s workshop buzzes two blows, the phone rings. I hear the guitarist come home. He waits in the dark hallway until a knock is struck on the door, then opens it and, short of breath, begins by the coat hooks. The girl on the third floor is in cahoots with him, the strumpet who previously played ball in the hallway. I look around the bedroom. Slowly and quietly it turns to day. Things come rapidly into the light from the darkness as the time of the day grows on the window blind. I open the closet to examine the coat hanging on a coat hanger. I’ll not let them run along my hallway. It is enough that their behavior keeps me awake. They can remain in their own rags. My gray coat hangs there no longer. Its time has come. The third coat I have had in my life. The first coat was a gray ulster coat. I bought it at Geysir. It was light gray with white stripes. Then I had a darker coat. And this one here is dark gray in color with black stripes. A thick coat. A warm coat. Somewhat too thick to stroll about in in summer. My shoes last me a decade. I wear shoes from the Bata factory in Czechoslovakia. By now Bata factories have likely been nationalized by the Soviet authorities. Perhaps large factory complexes with water slope roofs. My shoes. Slightly frayed shoes, but sturdy and good. I would not be opposed to visiting the Bata factories. They produce the world’s best shoes, all made from various leathers. There is a difference in seeing them versus icelandic barges, made in some dwarf factory and named Imperial shoes, no less, undoubtedly made from inferior leather. No, Czechs know how to make shoes, so that they do not scuff. They sow shoes from the finest Cordoba leather. The giddy people on the street saunter about in domestic Imperial shoes that have one thing in common—that their leather uppers slide about in wet conditions like a slimy commonwealth of rawhide. I despise people who let themselves be seen in the bank wearing Imperial footwear. Well, Títa, you nodded off reading. Do you know the story of the stork who invited the fox home to eat. You should not lap from the neck of a thin glass any more than the fox should. Here is a can lid. I picked the lid up off the street especially for you to lap from. One day I stumbled on it half buried in the mud between some tire tracks. I would not collect the lid while it was light; instead I waited for dark, and when it was sufficiently dim I went out to the trashcan at 16A, checked the air as if I were looking at the weather, drew a króna from my pocket, let it fall, then picked it up and put it in my pocket along with the lid. No. I hid it inside the palm of my hand, stood still in the same position while the shaking trembled my knees and I calmed myself. I hurried away, and after that I made sure no one ever saw me by the trashcans at 16A.

  my puss you have many things

  A person would probably have heard the news if I, Tómas Jónsson, an employee in the XII. pay grade in a state-run business, was observed picking dirty junk or a can lid up off the ground by the trash can at 16A. It would be interesting to know what people in the neighborhood think about me. They likely believe Tómas is an unsociable scientist, an odd twig or something similarly eccentric and icelandic hahaha

  I throw up over you

  A forty-year-old man’s childhood is far behind, but around sixty he approaches youth anew, though perhaps that is too early to just reminisce and live only in memories. But my lifetime is so uniform and impoverished, I am indeed so isolated from fat, so calcified, that I justify myself living night afte
r night and whole winter days in Thoughtland. True satisfaction lies in refusing life, falsifying events as best as possible, making true in fantasy how it is morning in a warm bed when, incredibly, you are lying at night under a cold blanket. Oh, this town—this cursed distended city—has always had a devilish effect on me. She crouches down on me with her revolting limpid sky. In dreams she is tolerable: as a nightmare is. Like a nightmare I have been on my own since I first aimed to be an expert on ecstasy. And I doubt that anywhere in the widest world can be found such a dull man as me. I am an unbearable devil. I am scum, a disfigured night-creature with white cracked teeth, a glowing tongue, hairy on the outside, not dissimilar to a tufted rat that runs over a naked body in a dream. To give an example: I’m so boring that no one has ever wanted my friendship. People prove this to be so by avoiding me in the street, spitting yellow erysipelas spittle at me on their way from the office of the city physician, without giving me an apologetic smile. I have strongly noticed malicious sneering people recently come from the epidemic clinics the newspapers publish regularly from January to April each year. I seemed heavy as a child, I felt happiest in the company of bacteria and viruses. Look at your siblings (Björga), it was said, look at how pure their expressions are, how they radiate joy like a christmas child, but you leak surliness all day. I see the devil reflected in your eyes (and truthfully the devil gleamed there, I was bored of Jesus with his stiff frozen expression and repellent tenderness). Nevertheless, I longed sometimes to be—for a moment—the one who told jokes and entertaining stories of strange people and strange events (or, for example, to be a sentimental singer and sing From the Heath so quiet everyone got goose bumps): the devil puts his fingerprints on the cyclist’s windbreaker; an uncanny fish swims out of the taps in a high-rise building, where a grouchy woman shuts herself inside the room because there is no balcony in the apartment and she cannot air the bedclothes; coral grows on a man’s head; mind connections emerge between a man in Norðfjörður and women in Stykkishólmi; a salmon carrying a woman’s snow-white hand is caught in Soginu. Whenever I have tried something like that, and rehearsed and prepared it, my words have become so exaggerated and violent that listeners have said: Oosh, don’t be so repulsive. At exactly the moment I most wanted to gather a good, harmonious group around me and be the life and soul of the gathering. Fortunately, this pretentious desire of mine was fleeting, wrapped up in a fivefold joke about myself telling a series of stories so hairy the women would get goose bumps and sweat between their breasts or pucker together their thighs for fear a hairy and invisible hand would touch them down there. “He had barely come through the door when the atmosphere of the party lightened and each story added to the witty stream from his lips well into morning; we rolled about laughing.” I dearly wish such comments would apply to me. But I, wooden man and log, serve no purpose while men die laughing other than to be a metal plate reverberating joy through frozen lips, while torment cries inside my mind. Somewhere I read that comic actors were usually dull and boring in their personal lives. I told Katrín this after unsuccessful attempts to create opportunities to speak up from the swamp of drowsiness. My sense of humor is considerable, attentive to play and the improbabilities of life, but Títa, Katrín, and Annakatrín look at me with eyes that say: Let’s see whether everything he has to offer runs aground, Tómas Jónsson telling his stories. I stand in the center of the floor, nervous agitation affecting my words, an uncontrollable fear at not being able to get the soul to smile his heavy lips. She offers a double-edged smile with her teeth, as if the tongue might trouble me; at most she is smiling politely or coughing nervously from anxiety, giving a hollow cough for appearance’s sake. I flap my limbs, a cord of fire around my forehead, and rush into the first and easiest of my trifling stories. People smack their lips dry in their mouths out of pity and change the subject before the atmosphere becomes suffocating, sometimes starting to sing national hymns, recalling memories from their school years and talking about their teachers in geography and natural science. Alas, this city with all its navel-gazing, boring men is most tolerable in a nightmare.