The End of the World. Maybe

by Jo Nesbo

  “You guys have been hypnotised,” Lisa said loudly and clearly.

  “Shh,” her commandant father said.

  “Shh,” her commandant mother said.

  “Did Mr Hic – I mean Mr Galvanius do this?” Lisa asked.

  “Quiet, Lisa,” her mother said. “Can’t you see? Our president is addressing the nation.”

  Lisa looked at the TV screen again. Then she said, “First of all, Norway is a parliamentary democracy. We don’t have a president. We have a king and a prime minister. And second of all, that guy isn’t the president of anything. That’s just Hallvard Tenorsen.”

  Her parents turned around to look at her, their faces pale and serious. In unison they gasped, “Just?!”

  “Yes,” Lisa said. “He’s a . . . uh . . . a singing chiropractor from Jönköping, Sweden.”

  “Lisa,” her mother said in that tone that told Lisa she was about to be chewed out. “I asked you to pay more attention to the news. President Hallvard Tenorsen was elected president of Norway and all its territories . . .” Her mother glanced at the clock. “. . . four hours ago. Where have you been? On the moon?”

  “In a way,” Lisa mumbled. “How did this happen?”

  “They asked the viewing audience to call in and vote,” her father said. “Tenorsen won and has already moved into the Royal Palace in Oslo. The prime minister, the whole government and the king were voted out and have to go home. Now President Tenorsen gets to make the decisions.”

  “The singing Swedish chiropractor is making decisions on behalf of our whole country?” Lisa asked in disbelief.

  “Hallelujah,” her mother said.

  “But what about the king? He lives in the Royal Palace. That’s his home.”

  “He’s gone into exile abroad,” her father said.

  “Where did he go?” Lisa asked.

  “R.S.T.”

  “Arresty?” Lisa repeated, trying to remember where that was from geography class.

  “The Republic of South Trøndelag,” her father replied. “He has a summer cabin up there.”

  “Um,” Lisa replied, “but South Trøndelag is a county in Norway.”

  “Obviously not,” her father replied.

  “Um, hello?” Lisa continued. “South Trøndelag? Known for great salmon fishing? South Trøndelag is a part of Norway, Dad.”

  Her father just said, “Shh!”

  “I need to know if Gregory Galvanius hypnotised you guys!” Lisa protested.

  But her parents were once again engrossed in Tenorsen’s speech.

  “Norway is an itty-bitty, little country,” Tenorsen said in all seriousness. “And yet – as a poet once said – it is the land of heroes. Which means that our country can sometimes feel a little, well, small. But I promise that I – with your help – will make it bigger. Greater Norway will soon be as big as all the other great empires of the world.”

  “Greater Norway?” Lisa asked. “He changed the name of our country?”

  “Shh!” Her parents hushed her in unison.

  Tenorsen raised his voice: “Greater Norway and its territories and colonies will soon extend from a desert in the south to a pole in the north. At least!”

  Lisa heard cheering and applause coming from the TV, but she thought that was weird because she couldn’t see an audience, just Tenorsen sitting at a little desk that looked suspiciously like the one the news anchor usually used.

  “Now, perhaps it sounds like I’m planning on making all the decisions unilaterally,” Tenorsen said.“But clearly that isn’t the case. After all, we’re living in a dictatorship – sorry, ha ha, obviously I mean a democracy! Everyone gets to decide. All I’ll do is issue a presidential recommendation, which should by no means be confused with a command. My first presidential recommendation is that everyone should do as I say. And it goes without saying that if you don’t support the idea, just let me know.”

  Tenorsen smiled broadly into the camera.

  “Yes, I very simply want to encourage everyone who doesn’t agree with me to let me know. Anyone who feels like the president shouldn’t make decisions at all can call the number shown on the screen now. Call and leave your name and address so I can . . . can . . .”

  Tenorsen’s facial expression had changed. He wasn’t smiling anymore. His blond hair had slipped down over his forehead, and his eyes gleamed as if he had a pair of headlights in his head instead. But then his face relaxed and he smiled that I-won-the-presidential-election smile again: “. . . discuss the matter with you.”

  Applause from the invisible audience.

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Lisa said.

  “Nonsense,” her commandant father said.

  “Hogwash,” her commandant mother said.

  “And while you contemplate the issue,” Tenorsen said, “we’ll sing a song. Because singing fosters community and solves all problems. Think about that. We’ll sing the traditional patriotic Norwegian song ‘Among Hills and Mountains.’”

  “I’m going to go to bed,” Lisa said. “Our class is having a ski day tomorrow.”

  Her mother turned and looked at her in astonishment. “Aren’t you going to sing along?”

  Lisa shook her head. “I prefer marching bands.”

  When Lisa was in bed, watching Nilly’s shadow theatre in the bedroom window across the street, she could hear “Among Hills and Mountains” echoing up from the living room. And when she closed her eyes, she could hear it emanating from all the houses on Cannon Avenue. She could picture the light from the TV screens flickering on people’s faces as they reverently followed their beloved president’s directions. Not just on Cannon Avenue, and not just in Oslo. But throughout all of Greater Norway. And its affiliated territories and colonies.

  “MY MUM AND sister laughed themselves silly when I asked if they felt hypnotised,” Nilly said, once he and Lisa had tramped up to the top of the ski slope on their skis. They stood in line with the other kids and waited for their turn. Everyone was wearing a bib with a start number on it. Lisa had number twelve, and Nilly had asked for number thirteen.

  “My mum and dad didn’t even respond,” Lisa said dejectedly. “They just wanted to watch TV.”

  “Number eight!” Mrs Strobe yelled from the bottom of the ski jump that she and Gregory Galvanius had built on the middle of the hillside.

  Number eight was Trym. He peered down the hill.

  “You do it,” he said to Truls, who was number nine. “I don’t feel like it today.”

  “Me either,” Truls said with a yawn.

  Then they pushed number ten, Ulrik, into place. Ulrik was still holding a slice of toast in his hand and his mouth was full, but he was so paralysed with fear that he just stood there, his skis locked into the tracks leading to the jump, slowly gathering speed. Finally he realised he was going to have to do something, so he tossed his toast aside and flung himself to the side. But a little too late. He sailed off the edge of the jump ramp in a sort of tipped-over-sideways position and landed in a sort of sideways spread-eagle position, making an Ulrik-shaped dent in the powdery snow next to the ramp. This earned him wild cheers and laughter as Galvanius helped him rearrange his skis, poles, legs and arms.

  “Thirteen feet!” Galvanius yelled. “Style points: zero point zero! Still in eighth and last place!”

  More laughter.

  “Number . . . let me see . . . eleven!” Mrs Strobe yelled.

  Beatrize got ready.

  “We’re going to have to expose Galvanius on our own,” Nilly said. “We have to spy on him and get proof of what he’s doing.”

  “Spy on him how?”

  “We’ll follow him when he goes home today. Find out where he lives, watch what he does. You know, basic standard spy work. Child’s play.”

  Beatrize started her jump and they followed her with their eyes. She took off from the edge of the ramp, swayed elegantly through the air and made a neat landing quite a ways down the slope.

  “Thirty-three feet!” Ga
lvanius yelled. “Style points: nineteen, nineteen and a half! She takes the lead!”

  Applause from the class.

  “Number twelve!” Mrs Strobe yelled.

  “Your turn,” Nilly said. “Here, take a little of this.” He held out his hand. It contained a small bag labelled “Doctor Proctor’s Fartonaut Powder.”

  “Fart powder!” she whispered. “Nilly, you’re crazy!” She grabbed the bag and stuffed it back into his pocket before anyone else saw it.

  Nilly shrugged and said, “All the more for me.”

  “That’s cheating, Nilly!”

  “Cheating?” Nilly asked, cocking his head to the side. “And what do you call Beatrize bringing special jumping skis that her father had a professional ski waxer prepare and wax for her? While I have to compete on these?”

  He nodded down at his own blue plastic mini-skis and held up his grandfather’s old wooden ski poles that he’d had to saw off to make short enough. And Lisa had to agree that with equipment like that it was no surprise that Nilly was in last place, by quite a bit, after the cross-country portion of the competition. Hopelessly far behind Beatrize.

  “We don’t have all day, number twelve!” shouted Mrs Strobe.

  Lisa pushed off. She took off softly, jumped, swayed as her skis wobbled a little, but made a clean, steady landing and turned off onto the flat area at the bottom of the jumping slope.

  “Twenty-eight feet!” Galvanius yelled excitedly. “Style points: eighteen and a half, nineteen. Still in third place!”

  “Number thirteen!”

  Lisa turned to look back up at the top of the slope, where she saw an elf-like silhouette who was already up to speed. A hush had fallen over the class, as if everyone knew that something unusual was about to happen. They knew this quite simply because Nilly was Nilly and you could always be rather sure that something unusual would happen if he were involved. And Lisa knew that this would be a little more unusual than usual because in the hush she heard Nilly counting down “Four, three, two, one . . .” which is how long it takes from when you swallow a bag of Doctor Proctor’s Fartonaut Powder until you cut the cheese with the strength and noise of a flock of three hundred thousand wildebeests and eighteen water buffaloes all farting in unison.

  “Zero!”

  Nilly had reached the edge of the jump ramp. Lisa covered her ears.

  The explosion was deafening and was followed by a brief, but violent, snowstorm. Afterwards everyone brushed the snow away from their eyes and blinked in confusion, looking around at the ski slope and at the thick spruce forest that surrounded them on all sides. But both the little red-haired boy and the ski jump that Mrs Strobe and Mr Galvanius had built were gone. Obliterated. Levelled to the ground.

  “Nilly!” Mrs Strobe yelled, slowly rotating like a, well, like a very slowly rotating strobe light.

  “Nilly!” Gregory Galvanius yelled.

  “Where are you?” Mrs Strobe yelled. She was so desperate that her glasses had slid all the way down to the tip of her nose.

  “Here!” yelled a voice from somewhere in the woods. Everyone turned and watched the itty-bitty, red-haired boy pushing his way out from between the enormous snow-covered trees with his poles. His smile was so big it looked like it might split his head in two.

  “Wh-what were you doing in the woods?” asked a bewildered but also clearly relieved Mrs Strobe.

  “Landing after my jump,” Nilly said. He took off his orange hat, checked that Perry was still where he was supposed to be, brushed the snow off his hat and carefully put it back on. “I almost nailed the Telemark landing. My feet were a little too close together, but my posture was great.”

  Everyone stared mutely at Nilly, who was poling his way over to Beatrize.

  “Here you go – a consolation prize for coming second. I plucked it off the top of the tallest spruce in there.”

  Beatrize stared with her mouth hanging open at the pinecone he handed her.

  THE REST OF the jumping competition was cancelled since they didn’t have a ramp anymore and, since they were so far north and it was winter, the sun was already sinking behind the trees. Gregory Galvanius stayed behind to clean up while the kids followed along behind Mrs Strobe in the groomed cross-country ski tracks, like ducklings following their mother. Nilly made sure he and Lisa were at the end.

  “We have to sneak away,” he whispered.

  “Why?” Lisa asked.

  “If we’re going to spy on Mr Galvanius today, we have to start now so we don’t lose him.”

  Lisa nodded. They lagged behind and when everyone else rounded a bend and disappeared from sight behind a grove of trees, Lisa and Nilly turned around and skied as quickly as they could back along the same trail they’d just come on.

  As they approached the open clearing where the ski slope was, they heard someone mumbling.

  “It’s Galvanius,” Lisa whispered.

  They hid behind some spruce trees and peeked out. Mr Hiccup was sitting on a sled, bending forwards over the radio he had used to play music for the class. Beside him was a stack of folded ski bibs with numbers on them and the START and FINISH banners. He was cradling his head in his hands, and it sounded like he was repeating the same three words over and over again.

  “What is he saying?” Nilly whispered.

  “Shut up!” Lisa urged. “Then maybe we could hear him.”

  “And if you weren’t so busy telling me to shut up, maybe we could hear then.”

  “Shh!”

  “Double shh!”

  “Triple shh!”

  “As many shhs as you can say plus one!”

  Lisa gave up. And listened.

  “Do you hear that?” Nilly whispered.

  “Yeah,” Lisa said. “He’s saying ‘I . . . am . . . invisible.’”

  “That’s our proof! The man is a moon chameleon!”

  That very instant Mr Galvanius raised his head, and Lisa and Nilly jumped back to hide behind the tree trunk.

  “Did he hear us?” Nilly whispered.

  “Shh!” Lisa said.

  “Double shh!”

  “Music?” Lisa asked.

  Nilly listened. “It’s De Beetels.”

  The music was coming from the radio:

  Yelp! I need a bandage.

  Yelp! Not just any bandage . . .

  THEY STUCK THEIR heads out from behind the trunk.

  “Where’s Galvanius?” Lisa asked.

  They didn’t see anything.

  “Did you feel that?” Nilly asked.

  “What?”

  “That shaking,” Nilly said. “Like something heavy just landed on the ground.”

  “Duck!” Lisa said.

  It was Mr Galvanius. He was suddenly herring-boning on his skis up over the hilltop, from the direction where the jump had been before Nilly farted it to smithereens. He grasped the rope attached to the sled with the radio on it, pulling everything along behind him and disappearing into the woods towards the parking lot.

  “Come on!” Lisa said, starting to push herself after him with her poles.

  “Wait!” Nilly said. “There’s just one thing I have to check first.” He snowplowed down the hill in the same spot where Mr Galvanius had come herring-boning up.

  When Nilly came back a minute later, he was out of breath and his eyes were wildly excited. “Mr Galvanius jumped!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He jumped SUPER-FAR! That shaking we felt was him landing.”

  “What are you saying? There isn’t even a jump there anymore.”

  “And still he jumped more than one hundred and fifty feet! I saw where his ski tracks disappeared. And they didn’t start again until down at the end of the clearing. A hundred-and-fifty-foot jump without a ramp, Lisa. That’s just not humanly possible!” Nilly lowered his voice. “From now on, we have to do our spying with the utmost caution. Because we’re not dealing with a human being, but some sort of creepy, creepy creature.”

  NILLY AND LI
SA skied as fast as they could, but they didn’t catch up to Mr Galvanius until he was in the parking lot. They waited between two cars and watched him lift the sled and the start numbers into a dusty old green station wagon, which was parked so that they had a good view of the back. Then he climbed in and started the car, which spluttered and spat out black exhaust.

  “What do we do?” Lisa asked. “We’re going to lose him.”

  “Not if I have anything to do with it,” said Nilly, who did actually have something to do with it. He handed Lisa his ski poles, skated over to the car on his short plastic skis, squatted down and grabbed the car’s back bumper.

  The engine made some ugly choking sounds, which Lisa realised meant that Mr Galvanius was trying to put the car in reverse. Reverse!

  “Watch out!” Lisa shouted. “He’s going to back—!”

  But it was too late. The green car backed out of the parking spot, right over Nilly, who disappeared.

  “Oh no!” Lisa wailed. But when the car turned and started moving forwards, Nilly appeared again, still holding firmly onto the bumper. Mr Galvanius drove across the parking lot towards the main road with Nilly in tow. But as the car approached the school bus the teachers had rented for the class ski day, Mrs Strobe came over and flagged Mr Galvanius down by waving her hands.

  Lisa saw him roll down his driver’s side window and heard Mrs Strobe’s voice exclaim, “Lisa and Nilly are missing! We have to look for them!”

  Mr Galvanius was already getting out of his car, and Lisa realised they were about to be discovered. Something had to be done. And it might require doing something Lisa intensely disliked: lying. But since what was ultimately at stake here was the end of the world, she had no choice.

  “Hey!” Lisa cried out, slipping out from between the parked cars and waving with the ski poles, both her own and Nilly’s sawed-off ones.

  “Lisa!” Mrs Strobe yelled. “Where have you been?”

  “We took a shortcut,” Lisa said, using her poles to pull herself closer so that they wouldn’t come towards her, which would bring them past the back of the car and result in their discovering Nilly. “We got here way ahead of you. Nilly got tired of waiting so he, uh, took a cab back.”