by Nicolai Houm
The path took them high up the side of a valley with a shallow river running far below. The shimmering mist from the river hung in the air like a spider’s web. Jane caught up with Ulf and walked alongside him. She began talking about something she hadn’t planned to talk about – something she felt was over and done with. But then, it might be the kind of thing Ulf would approve of, what with his going on about being one with nature.
‘One might begin to wonder if there isn’t something that is bigger than us.’
She spread her arms wide.
‘Like what?’
‘Perhaps something that exists outside or beyond the individual.’
‘You don’t express yourself very clearly,’ Ulf said, staring straight ahead.
‘I listened to a highly regarded physicist doing one of the TED Talks and he was arguing that all systems possess a level of consciousness, and the more complex the system, the more advanced the consciousness. One possible consequence of his argument is that there is an enormous, superior consciousness.’
‘God?’
Ulf said the word in a way that made it sound anaesthetizingly dull.
‘Not necessarily. But some force in nature, something large and powerful that our empiricism has not yet helped us to discover.’ She almost had to run to keep up with him and her voice trembled. ‘Something we’ve perhaps avoided taking notice of, and preferred to put into a religious category?’
‘Instead of what?’
‘What that physicist was talking about.’
She had always been more persuasive, and sounded wiser, in writing than in speech. The discrepancy had long frustrated her and that frustration had been one of the factors that made her decide to be a writer when she was just twelve or thirteen years old. When she became a teacher, she prepared herself so thoroughly that the lessons mostly entailed reciting her own texts from memory.
Ulf stopped abruptly, looked quickly around, and then bent down to pull something off from where it grew on the side of a stone.
‘Look at this!’ he said, pointing to a tuft of moss.
‘Where?’
‘Just there.’
She looked closer. The tip of his index finger was indicating a pale, trumpet-shaped growth a little larger than the head of a pin.
‘Look at its perfect shape!’
It reminded her of the rough horns of plenty that children used to draw in school for Thanksgiving.
‘Cladonia fimbriata, or trumpet lichen. Belongs to the class of Lecanoromycetes. This is one of the wonders of nature. No need to look any further for wonderfulness. I can tell you exactly how it originated and why it grows in this habitat.’
‘I don’t doubt that at all.’
Ulf threw the moss away. She had expected him to return it to the stone reverently, which would, one way or the other, have supported the point he had made.
Then he raised the binoculars that hung round his neck, placed his legs well apart and started turning slowly.
‘Musk oxen are harder to spot in the autumn when the heather has turned brown.’
She considered using her binoculars, too, but they were in the bottom of her rucksack.
‘Because the musk oxen are brown as well,’ Ulf added.
‘I get it,’ Jane said.
He was reaching the end of a panoramic scan carried out evenly and methodically, and didn’t seem bothered when the binoculars pointed straight at her face.
‘Do you see anyone?’ she asked.
‘No one,’ he said.
When they stopped the first night, Ulf walked down to a mountain stream that had carved a gully in the ground behind their campsite. A good-sized gully, but not deep enough to leave it in any doubt that he was naked. Afterwards, he went over to her and stood in full view with a tiny, green microfibre towel as a loincloth. He was in great shape and almost certainly noticed that she noticed.
Jane started to pull the tent out of its bag.
‘Is that a tattoo you’ve got there?’ Jane asked.
Ulf came closer and contracted one pectoral muscle.
‘It symbolizes freedom,’ he said.
The tattoo showed an eye.
‘It’s an eagle’s eye. I’ve always been interested in eagles.’
‘Isn’t everyone?’
‘But I figured having an entire eagle would be a little banal, so just the eye seemed a better idea.’
‘How’s one to know that it’s the eye of an eagle? Not the eye of a budgie, say?’
‘How does one know?’ His eyebrows moved a little higher up. He drew a small circle on his chest muscle.
‘You knew from the prominent shadow here, almost like an eyebrow.’
She leant closer to him.
‘Boo!’ he shouted and pressed his chest against her face. ‘The eagle attacks!’
She had made up her mind to erect her tent, say that she was very tired, which happened to be true, too, and crawl into her sleeping bag at once. While Ulf got dressed, she dragged the inner and outer sheets, the tent pins and an unlikely number of lengths of rod out of the olive-green tent bag. Naturally, there was no set of instructions. In Norway, anything to do with tents was supposed to be common knowledge.
While she struggled with the tent, she sensed Ulf observing her.
‘Jane. About those books of yours?’
He was stirring a bagful of freeze-dried food. It was the first time he had shown any interest in her work – or, what had been her work.
‘What kind of novels are they?’
‘I don’t know what to say… just, novels.’
She hadn’t meant to sound curt but his question was one she had always found difficult to deal with. She stood still, a piece of tent rod in each hand, and thought about The Age of Plenitude. She had written it as if she still lived in the time before the September 11 attacks, before the economic crisis. While other writers had taken on board the seriousness of the times, she had carried on focusing on smaller causes and effects. But why shouldn’t she? Her world had not changed. She didn’t know many people who had lost their jobs, and no one who had died when the Twin Towers collapsed. Presumably, many readers had been in the same situation, since the book sold so well. But the sales could also reflect a need for escapism, something similar to the seventies pop tune ‘Happy Times’ shooting to the top of the music charts in the middle of the grimmest recession since the Great Depression.
Besides, what she wrote was not easy-going or far from real life. She wrote about unrequited love, social anxiety, weariness. And she had tackled such themes again in her last manuscript. It was never completed. She had reached page 104 of the story about a woman who had a comfortable life with uncomplicated existential challenges until the all-powerful Author decided it was time for some high seriousness and an old, cold metal arm swung down from Heaven and flattened her under a full stop.
‘I read mostly professional stuff,’ Ulf said.
‘Of course, it makes sense.’
She had managed to slot two equally long rods together.
‘But when I read fiction, I like a good story. Preferably with new subjects to learn about. You know, like historical events. Do you write about historical events?’
‘I don’t write any more, you know that.’
‘But when you did, was it about history?’
‘No, it wasn’t.’
‘What are your books about, then?’
She shrugged.
‘A book must be about something, surely?’
‘Must it? Can’t it be about lack of action? Like Seinfeld.’
‘I don’t like Seinfeld.’
Yet another difference between them that, for a few long seconds, she allowed to grow into a huge, all-encompassing sense of loneliness.
‘Are you sure you know what to do? Can I help?’ he asked.
She had managed to insert several of the rods into place and had pulled the tent into an arch that looked completely unsafe.
‘You concentrate on your
tent and leave me to mine,’ Jane said.
‘My own tent?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I didn’t bring a tent. Now that we’ve got yours.’
The next day, fog was beginning to well up from the bottom of the valley. She trudged along behind Ulf again but the walking was tougher now. As the day wore on, it grew harder to share his enthusiasm about the many sightings of musk ox excrement. Maybe the tension that was growing between them had something to do with this. Her lack of interest in turds.
He walked with his chest thrust forward and his arms swinging vigorously, as if wading through deep water. Suddenly he exclaimed, ‘And then they come along and tell me that I won’t have access to the biodiversity labs. Top priority for phylogenetic systematology and evolution, if you please.’
She had no idea who they were and wasn’t too sure about phylogenetic either. But in one way at least, all that was still within her field: the correct term for what Ulf had been saying is egocentric speech, a survival from an early phase in children’s speech development. At that stage, the child doesn’t recognize any clear boundaries between itself and the outside world, and doesn’t take into account that it might have information that isn’t available to whoever is listening.
There was another possibility, namely that Ulf had continued a line of thought he had been holding forth about but which she had missed because she had been walking just behind his back.
‘He stole my boot when we were playing fire truck so I peed on the roof,’ Jane said in a low voice.
But Ulf didn’t register that she had said anything.
Before they had finished erecting the tent, the wind was back and the fog too. She used to think that wind and fog couldn’t occur at the same time, that the two meteorological phenomena were mutually exclusive. How long could weather like this continue? Ulf didn’t say. But the truth was: for days on end.
They were sitting in her tent drinking coffee when Ulf suddenly put his arm around her and pulled her close.
‘We’ll find them soon,’ he said.
She hadn’t taken any medicine since they left Dombås, even though a doctor there had let her have two whole boxes – and not suppositories either. Up here, she felt there was more room for her senses, letting them reach out freely into a world of nothingness. But her abstinence and the thickening mist combined into a feeling that reminded her of being young and having a migraine in a totally quiet bedroom on a Sunday afternoon. Ulf’s arm around her waist seemed to hold her inside that feeling.
She caught the reflections in his glasses as his lips searched for hers. She turned away, not in conscious, thought-out rejection of him but instinctively, as one instantly wipes cobwebs off one’s face while moving about in a dark attic. She had visualized the two of them kissing and even, at times and for whatever reason, wished that they would. But it felt quite different now, when it was about to happen.
She crawled out of the tent. Wandering off anywhere wasn’t an option because the white-out had obliterated the landscape. She used up five matches to light a cigarette. When she glanced over her shoulder, she saw that Ulf was still inside the tent, lying on his belly and making notes in a spiral-bound notepad.
‘I just wanted to see them standing in a circle,’ she said loudly enough to be heard above the wind.
Ulf made a lot of noises intended to communicate strong feelings.
‘You didn’t think we would actually do that? You didn’t think we would try to provoke that behaviour?’
Even with her back turned, she could sense Ulf shaking his head.
‘Perhaps it hasn’t struck you that it would be a dangerous thing to do? Indicated, for instance, by the words defensive formation?’
Admittedly, she hadn’t considered this. Not in her state of Musk Ox aquavit-induced delirium that first evening. Nor at any time later. It had only been an image in her mind: animals in a circle.
‘This summer alone, the air ambulance service had to pick up two tourists who hadn’t observed the recommended safe distance.’
She threw the cigarette butt into a gust of wind and watched as it shot away like a small projectile.
‘Musk oxen can get to sixty kilometres an hour at full speed,’ Ulf pointed out.
Kilometres an hour was pretty meaningless to her, and she must have been visibly unimpressed because Ulf added, ‘Usain Bolt can get to thirty-seven kilometres an hour over a short distance.’
‘Perhaps he’d run faster if he was chased by a musk ox?’
Ulf turned back to his notes.
‘Are there no warning signs?’ she asked.
Ulf said while carrying on with his work, ‘When they feel provoked, they start snorting and striking the ground with their horns.’
‘Fine.’
‘No, it’s very much not fine,’ Ulf said. ‘Don’t believe that these behaviours are kind of optional. One thing always follows another.’
She looked like a weary question mark.
‘Imagine a large ship that’s about to move away from the quayside. Two warning blasts and they’re not saying: I might or might not be reversing now.’
‘True. They mean: Out of my way!’
‘Correct, Jane. But you don’t usually move at sixty kilometres an hour, do you? At least, I haven’t seen anything of the sort.’
‘Fuck you, Ulf.’
‘And you, Jane.’
JULIE WAS ELEVEN. She used to say especially pleasing words inside her head. Sometimes, when she thought she was alone, the words became just audible, like whistling with cracked lips: Engelbert Humperdinck. Hang Seng in Hong Kong.
Julie filled the window sill in her room with tubes of flavoured lipgloss.
Julie became sarcastic when her blood sugar level was low.
Julie played the piano with the straight back of a piano-playing girl of long ago.
Julie sat in the back of the car and let off a loud, bleating burp and said, ‘Oh dear. I’m so sorry.’ Looking at her in the rear-view mirror, it was obvious that a miraculous rebalancing was underway: the size of her front teeth and her mouth was more in keeping, her head was no longer a ball balanced on the stick-like body of child.
Julie, all of her four feet eleven inches, curled up in your arms and breathed warmly into your ear.
Julie laughed a lot.
Julie cried a lot.
Some of Julie’s traits had jumped several generations: the Miss Teen looks of her father’s mother, the dark-blond hair of an Askeland woman who left the poverty of Norway behind in the nineteenth century.
Julie was pernickety.
Julie swept her ponytail up high, pushed some hair forward to make a short fringe and mimicked a callow boy: ‘Do you love me unconditionally?’
Julie danced as if she were the only one alive in the world.
Now and then, Julie was allowed to choose her own clothes: jeans that looked as if they’d been painted on her legs, tops that left her belly bare. Frills! It was impossible to work out if her choices were alarmingly sexualized or if the alarmist adult gaze added that special charge.
Julie was eleven but slept as if she were an infant, one hand protectively against her neck. Greg whispered, ‘Remember, she did that even at St. Mary’s?’
Of all that Jane remembered from that time, her most distinct memory was the light. A light, as if painted in oils, was there every time she woke. Light falling on the roofs of the houses, snow-covered even though it was March, flowing in through the family room’s two tall windows whose blinds could be raised electronically using a remote control so that, from her bed, Jane could regulate them according to how much light her heart could hold.
She lay there looking at Julie, after having been through a world of pain so implausibly overwhelming that she was already well on her way to forgetting it. Instead, there were Julie’s domed, gummed-up eyes below little bumps that would, with time, grow into her eyebrows. And Julie’s nose, no larger than the tip of Greg’s little finger but still the mo
st outgoing feature in a face that shouted: Get me back in there where I came from! In an instant, Jane realized that her own inner darkness was not the same as her own mother’s, and that she would never come to prioritize her own emotional needs over the needs of this child. Although she had hardly talked to a child since she was one herself and thought her friends’ children, despite appearing to be imitation human beings, were actually small trolls whose goal was to block all decent conversation, she found it very easy to love her own daughter. Watching Julie, Jane felt herself becoming the light, as if at any moment she might change from being a person into no more than the radiance illuminating her baby’s face.
Among the mass of information made available to her before the birth – the Lamaze classes, the women’s magazine articles, the pregnancy check-ups – nothing had been said about this light. All the factual knowledge, so much more than one could possibly wish for, was nothing but a cover-up for everyone’s failure to describe it.
The staff at St. Mary’s circled around them, offering every kind of postnatal support. Jane didn’t respond with her usual edginess to gentle-voiced professional insistence, not even when a woman with large glasses and a floral blouse introduced herself as lactation consultant and told her that she, the consultant, was available on a special white phone line so that Jane could air her breastfeeding issues at any time. Jane’s urge to categorize, to distance herself, to resist – all was calmed by the light. This became very obvious when Robert and Dorothy visited. She listened smilingly to her mother’s advice and interpreted her father’s lack of engagement as just awkwardness (he stood by the window and argued about access to parking).
As parents they were novices, and shameless with it. The first time Greg did Julie’s diapers, she was lying safely on a changing table with high edges but he still carried out the whole procedure with one hand while keeping his other hand gently on the baby’s chest.
‘She won’t levitate,’ Jane said.
‘How do you know?’ Greg said.
He took the next day off: sneaked out of his office at the Wisconsin State Journal after dashing off some copy for the entertainment pages, and battled his way past a multiple car crash on Beltline Highway, all in order to get to the hospital before the end of the evening. Jane had been struggling to stay awake and had to force her head out of her dream world to be kissed by Greg.