Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller

  Formula for Visitors

  Knock three to four blows with the knuckle of your middle finger on the front door at chest height. Respectful blows; then wait a moment. If a woman opens it a crack and looks round, ask: Is the master of the house at home? While you wait for a response, moisten your lips. Yes, I think he’s resting inside his room, the woman says. Then, press your left hand firmly on the doorpost, steady yourself, kick off the shoe on your left foot by stepping your right toe on your left heel. While you take off your shoes the wife will watch your movements by the inner door in the hall, which will open after you’ve taken off both shoes. Go into the corridor, knock gently on the room door and look around until you hear an answer from within: Ye-es, come in. In order to see you in the doorway the husband leans over the divan edge and bellows. He rises halfway up and stretches out a little hand, greets you, then lets himself fall back onto the divan with a sigh and stretches his legs. If he emits unpleasant odors, take a chair and sit at the head. Let silence reign a while; take a newspaper from the side table, rustle it, flatten it. If the question is: What passes, answer the sluggish: Nothing—or at most: Nothing special. Be careful to be on guard and do not say anything particular. If you are offered refreshments, drink three cups of coffee and eat cookies from the center of the plate. Then squirm on your chair and go, after giving thanks for your welcome. If there are children in the house you should of course pinch them gently on the cheek and ask: Whose are these handsome kids? On the way out the hall it is right that you promise you will never visit anyone and instead on Sundays rest at home on your divan.

  The kids rush in and run a double circle around me on the chair. Get lost, he howls from the newspaper. He is rather tall and stocky, his pants smartly creased. His neck rests on poorly made pillows. Feet crossed, his heels sink into cushions at the couch arm. What are you up to now, he asks through the booming. I look at the radio and ask him to repeat what he said. Yes, I have to turn it up to drown out the din of my old lady and the kids. They are lively and energetic. Ási and Ása rush in again and run twice around me on the chair. Both are taking piano lessons and Ása is also a violin maestro. Both have ballet three times a week after school and are taking a candy class where they learn to choose healthy candy from fifteen different jars on a candy shelf, some of which are unhealthy traps. It occurs to me to trip them, but I resist and look around the room. Yes, you see the cracks in the concrete, he said. Criss-crossing. There are worse cracks in the bedroom. We walk around the room in our socks and look thunderstruck at various wide cracks. We stand on a chair and follow them with our fingers and he lifts the floor carpet and points out the cracks under it. Some fault in the base, he sighs, the concrete dried wrong and molded or the mixture was off, too wet. You try to save and this happens to the building. He drew my attention to the veneered doors, showed me the paint on the windows; cracks everywhere. Even the glass in the picture frames began to burst and my cup was a fine network of dark defects. One lovely day everything here will explode into the air, he sighs, and we will just have to hope there are no bystanders and we can escape to safety in the United States. Sweat breaks out on his forehead, pearls in his wrinkles. Everything goes to hell except for America, he says, and where will we be then. I recognize Ásmundur, eating his possessions, lapping them out his soup spoon. In the end, he laps his own death from the spoon’s bowl. Everything we have gets eaten up over time. Since early childhood, I determined to avoid this, faults becoming flaws. I offered my willing shoulders under heavy burdens. Sigurður calls us beasts. I am proud to accept that name. I boast at being indentured. I shed no tears over music albums. I do not get goose bumps listening to pop songs. I push away icons and blurred images. I am a realistic man who clings fast to the reality of things. Things are loyal though I avoid finding something out about an object, I just love looking. In my eyes a chair is just a chair, a house a house, a flower a flower. I do not destroy one meaning to find another. I do not answer the four ultimate questions:

  Which party will you choose on election day. How much have you deposited in your bank savings. Do you say evening prayers. What are you paid as a monthly salary.

  The answers to these questions are private. I want to live in peace like a useless stone. In my eyes, my apartment is my peace. It is justice. Truth, too. I can hardly believe this evidence myself. I say to Títa, earnestly: these are all concepts. That’s what I was taught. You and I are concepts, too. But only in a sense. In my eyes, we are things. If I say that, you will send me a threatening letter and protest: No.

  Everything is both material and interpretation. Interpretation is material and material hides interpretation.

  You give off a decent heat, my Títa.

  I spoke to god and asked him to make me an imbecile so I could not understand my misery. I wrote about the vices that accompany my life. I could not tolerate Katrín’s presence; she claimed the best advice to save the apartment would be to rent or sell it at a high cost. Such salvage is our common problem though we chose different paths. Two parallel lines meeting nowhere except in the apartment. Maybe I will lose it because of a remote-control force too strong for me. That’s you, mister mayor. The evil and capricious Aztec rain god requiring ever greater and more frequent human sacrifices for each drop of water you send us. We are continually offering larger portions of our flesh without you letting rain down from the clouds from your carved oak chair where saturated air lets sweat pearl in your high temples to no avail, mister mayor.

  Respectfully

  Tómas Jónsson.

  September 27, 1956.

  Tonight I scrambled to bed immediately after dinner. I cooked for myself. I ate on a chair in the corridor and hooked my toes around its back legs to stabilize myself. I do this because people look into the kitchen. There’s no screen, not even cardboard. If I turn on the light and sit in the kitchen to eat is like being in a field, seen from the street. I do not like the cars pausing, people sticking their heads out the window, looking amazed at me and saying: a man sitting eating in an empty apartment. I eat and digest my food in the dark. It is difficult to balance the chair in the dark. But man adapts to his circumstances and find measures, such as hooking his toes around the chair’s feet. Kids hammer on the windowpane. Evidently others in the house find it strange that the apartment stands empty. I am not especially worried about other people’s opinions. In everyday speech, I am referred to as a brute. The creature in there, the rabble says. Never eats anything but sausages. I am okay being called a brute. The fines for not renting can be up to one million. I lay on the divan. Very tired; brutes often are. I checked my ears in a pocket mirror and said to Katrín, do not go getting used to sitting at home at night and not going carousing. She steamed up, flustered. Fiery and unruly, she attacked me, in the diaphragm this time so I belched or hiccupped three times then drank icy water from the brink of the cup and clamped my thumb and index finger over my nose. I finally managed to stop hiccupping, but then I vomited the water on the floor and splashed in it with my toes. I begged Katrín to speak mildly; I cannot stand the eternal shame. She raised her voice like heartburn, but I said: if an icy harbinger comes for me in the likeness of a swan, saying death has had his eye on me, I would answer: I never did anything I could be ashamed of and if you give me the chance to relive life I would take the offer. I regret nothing, she said, and will die because no one has managed to discover eternity, and even if they managed it, it would go to someone other than me. So speaks a bully. You are a desperate soul, I protest feebly. I know your plans for me: you are selfish, sly, devious, and seek to break me with your authoritarianism. Ever since that day, the moment I first felt your presence and heard your rustle in the hallway, I have cursed you.

  Then I addressed her again and said: Get lost, Katrín, follow your old nature. Sell yourself to a stranger, to the highest bidder. Become some foreign shore, its porpoise, deserving to be blown up with dynamite so you do not pollute the atmosphere with your whoring, decaying the earth and m
alforming the sea. People will grab your nose when you pass and ships take a detour and avoid your beaches. You fiery island that birds avoid. Migrating birds shit on you and fly away screaming in disgust. And other whore-friends throw stones at you despite signing agreements about loyalty in adultery. Because compared to your sins, all sinners are sin-free. Only stranded fish love you and the flies that beget you buzzing black worms. Your eyes are full of reptiles. Your nose exhales gunpowder smoke. Your genitals are a lice sanctuary. Neither curious shells nor seaweed arouse you. No gust of wind blows worms from your scabrous belly. Your lousy ruins taking donations from the American army like a hen with featherloss under an earth ridge. You are just as licey as before. Fly off to where frost lives. Boast of your riches of ice, where nothing stirs fixed roots.

  o katrín o katrín a military base in your belly

  do not shout after me: Too . . . much, Too . . . mas, Tomb-ass, Tómmas. The truth that some born alive might be undesirable, instead lead falls from your belly or gray stones that mate amid an intense erosion of wind and produce vegetation-free gravel. I come to agree. The gravel increases its kin through mercy and irritation. Here will be your end. Your belly hard as corn. Humanitarianism manifests when nothing gets born, neither thought nor flesh, maintaining the act of thinking generation to generation. By contrast, life gets saved from death when being no longer exists. Anxiety is worse than death. Anxiety humiliates whereas death is exalted by its absolute perfection. The dead cannot suffer. The corpse is the most evolved version of the body. It was madness to birth something as tender as a body in this apartment. The farmer does not strew farmer manure on a frozen brook. No man sows grass in surf.

  memories and the gravel bed uninhabited except for low gravelbed vegetationand people flocked there at night to breathe the clear evening freshnessskirts swung their light fabrichats lifted in the farewell of a calm breezesometimes I get the aroma of unknown herbsin an easterly direction smoke waving from the chimneys of houses over the gravel bedI stop a whilemy thoughts run down all the floral species that I knowI think I search my nose’s archive to ascertain the fragrance and find the lost aroma is a brown cow on a slope lying up opposite the steppes of an almost horseshoe-shaped archwith the support of hands on each knee alternately you tug yourself higher and higher up the steep slope and discover a lawn on top where a man lies down and binds himself fast by the arms, hugging himself, but with his feet the man pushes his body away and rolls ledge to ledge and the ocean covers its sexual instinct in its clean image and green grass and the ocean swallowing cherished stones in the cool grass on the flat land perhaps existence itself

  I haul a few steps further. Dusk comes rapidly here. Brass braces glow on the edges of the steps. I reach my arms up and by squeezing my belly I pee freely in my pants, unhindered. I have not peed my pants since I was a child and do not remember how it felt, but I have often thought about finding out. I know a man pisses himself in old age before dying. I enjoy but find repulsive the warm urine flowing about my thighs, but it is hardly special to pee my pants in the bank where I work. Out on the street it is still raining, on house roofs and gardens. Glimpses of light flow halfway up the façade, but cannot properly break through the windows. On the upper floor the windows are larger and wider. We could watch the traffic on the street by resting our elbows on the windowsill. We manage to see slanting house roofs, two of copper, many house corners, several gardens. Here we will likely have to remain for two nights. Today constitutes a Saturday, according to the calendar, Títa, and the watchman has locked the building. The only exit route is through his apartment and the concrete courtyard so garbage men can easily drive their cars to the bins. The bins with their hinged lids. One has a gray galvanic and fluted exterior. It is private property and was stolen from the American military. Bjössi was probably the one passing through earlier. His pipe smoke lingers in the air; he had to check the lights, lower the heat. In the hallway it is getting cool and I feel the damp cold steal over me through my pissed pants. You’re in my bag, pussy, head out of the hole. Eyes a-twinkle, the teeth on the zipper a garland around your neck. Damp cold steals over me like a terrible childhood memory. Lament nothing, Tómas Jónsson; that memory is written off, too. Memories warm no one up. Their life withers as fire does. You will get warmer by the radiator. Central heating is better than memory. Look, a break in the movie. People stream out to smoke in the cool of the evening. Some eat chocolates on the sidewalk; others look at glass displays. One wanders along the sidewalk in front of this building. Most are dog-tired of the movie and the rest of the screening. Three teenagers look for a chance to sneak in unseen during the break, they want to see how the woman is raped, the bank robbed, the criminals die in the electric chair like an obnoxious moral at the end. Indeed, one couple decides not to return after the break. They go home in a car. It’s not unlikely they were fumbling with one another under his coat which they spread on their knees in the seats. It’s common at the movies. People watch the car disappear. We should see if the picture improves, they say, loitering in dispersed groups, lacking topics of conversation. While the women talk they pick incessantly and brush lint from each other, but the men stand erect with hands behind backs, lifting up on their toes and heels alternately. They rock during the break. The name promised a lot, if only the performance would live up to it, one says. Now light fades and the myopic doorman, who was once a sailor, comes out of the candy booth and holds the door open. Now everyone finishes up and people pack into the theater. While they are waiting in their rows of seats there are advertisements for their eyes, then the film starts up halfway through and people smack and whisper silence. Yesterday the newspapers published a picture on their covers of a cloud that looked like a claw or streaks on the western horizon, but the storm detoured past town and took the land route over the fjords and attacked the houses on the east side with storm and rain. The wind scrapes the streets. Street lights seem to shake their head from the rain dripping into their eyes, but strictly speaking, their helmets are just vibrating in the wind. People dare not leave their houses. A single taxi splashes about the streets and flings puddles from its wheels. I have to get out. For sure, I could pull together a pile of mats from the corridor as a bed to sleep on. I have to break out. I go to the stairs and creep silently down the steps to the door. The wind beats at the oak door. She will swell with water and get stuck in the frame come Monday. If a door is made from good wood, for example oak, it should not swell. Perhaps this is a door made out of recovered organ pine. No, it cannot be. The door is made of ordinary pine. I almost weep to see a latch inside the door. Where else would the lock be, locks are inside what is locked. A man locks what’s inside with a key outside. I just need to turn the knob and the door opens. The wind throws rain onto the floor. I find it difficult to breathe in the heavy columns of wind that rage at the entrance to the corridor and creak inside the building. I look around the streets. Tómas Jónsson runs along the sidewalk by the building wall. Slush spills from the roofs. The wall offers considerable shelter so his coat gets wet mostly on the left shoulder, turned away from him. A car approaches. A police car drives past me and moves slowly along the road. I stand in the puddle, which expands because of the congested downpour. Where are you going, they shout from the car window, grimacing at the torrents. Tómas does not reply. Now he attempts to know how to shut up. To just look at the puddle without having to go wading. I set off. The puddle is deep. If I go any farther water will fill my overshoes. His overcoat absorbs rain and gets heavy. The car drives backward. What route are you taking, they call out. Returning home, I answer. Where do you live. Water ripples as the storm squalls and swells about my overshoes. Where are you going. I do not answer, but try to see if I can avoid the puddle. My right to remain silent is indisputable. A person is free to remain silent in the streets; this is not a visit. I’m in public. Two police officers exit the car. Best to drive him back. I’m not going anywhere with you. I am going my own way. Do not resist. Everyone has some r
esistance. Do not obstruct. Where do you live. I do not answer. I have not committed a crime and am under no obligation to speak. I’m free to be silent in a free country. Can any lout jostle a citizen, demand his name and address. Come on, buddy, don’t be obstructive. It doesn’t pay. No, I’m not going anywhere in a car. I will walk. I get carsick. Come on, it’s blowing the roofs off houses. I don’t care if the roofs blow off. Do you want a roof on your head. I do not want anything. They seize the man. I taste salt in the wind and hear the murmur of the sea, unburdening myself from my wet coat. Come on. I clamber into the back of the car. I sit on the bench. I have a clean reputation. I was returning home. I sit on a hard seat. They sit on foam cushions. You cannot see people’s intention. I am oddly calm. The police speak into the radio, give call signs and change directions, satisfied with the transceiver. What is the address. He will not say. He does not give anything up. We will drive him downslope. No, no, he’s calm. Where is this bloody downslope, I yell. Do not yell. It does not pay. Everyone yells. You, friend. I do not yell. Things go badly for those who yell. The wind tugs open the door. Outside there are two police officers. It is really windy in the courtyard and they say: Come out, do not yell. You yelled, says the young detective who had sat facing me and looked curiously at me in the car, eager to be of assistance, but never a word past his lips. Now they lead me in and get reinforcements at the door. I do not want to enter, but they swing me over the threshold. I am surprised that the seams in the old coat hold. It has not fused together. As soon as we enter, the night watch flows in from the break room to surround us. The police officers are wearing creased, damp clothes, which smell of their body heat and I recognize a crotch smell. Katrín said policemen always had a crotch smell. They are total crotches. Steam rises from their dark clothing because they have placed them on a glowing electric radiator to dry. The mood is calm yet I say: You have no right. He does not want to say his name. No one cares about my name or where I live. You think, he says and rummages on the shelf and calls a police car. He hands me a booklet about shooting off my mouth from a glass panel. His eyes flicker and he asks, disinterestedly: do you understand. Yes, I reply. What is your name. Tómas. Tómmas, he replies and thuds open a thick book with typewritten names in columns. Is this the population register, I ask. It does not concern you, he says. That fits, he says, Tómmas. The book does not draw my curiosity, but I ask: What did I do. I want a lawyer immediately tomorrow. You head home. Are you going with me. I am farther away now than when they arrested me. No one arrested you. What is it then. A warning. You have a nice stroll and read the article along the way. He looks accusingly at the policemen and they drift into the break room, stretch their legs by the glowing radiator, and take off their jackets. Steam rises off their shoulders like scattering fog. All in black galoshes. No roofs will fly off the houses. Barely fly past your head. I am alone on the floor and when I turn a sleeping drunk rises from the wooden bench and looks at me for a moment. Did you call me. Keep sleeping, they say. The man removes a stretched wet jacket from his head. One eye looks down at me. He sticks his tongue out, and gives a signal that he needs a cigarette. Bring me something to smoke. I yell and the police officers grab me and throw me down the stairs through the back door. I fall in the dark and the door bursts open. I fumble along the ground in the dark and touch pieces of wood and rocks. I get up and check my leg and arm bones are intact. The route, though it is long, has an end. I will get home to the divan in my overcoat and in overshoes, which are soaked through to the wet feet. They puddle with every footstep. As I grope under my coat, the bag with Títa lands in the puddle. She is sealed inside the bag and catches her breath. The rain pounds on the leather. A car turns the corner and a puddle sloshes out from under the wheels. The car approaches the bag. Títa kicks her legs. She doesn’t do so much as hiss. She is crushed. Tomorrow someone will find a high-quality leather case with a crushed cat, a letter smeared with fish, and some composition books. Never again will I go to work an unbrokena sore heavy soundI wrestled me down onto the divan I shut my head under the coversI get bonechills, am sickI am vomitingI feel the body being crushedI shiver, dressed warmly in blanket and coatfrom this I wake up crying in the middle of the night and hear a rustle in the corridorKatrín comes home at night having gone out, amused herselfbut she never turns back to me