by Nicolai Houm
In the moment he placed his hand where her shoulder was under the sleeping bag, she knew what he would say and realized that her reaction would be impossible to control.
‘… is to let time do its healing work.’
‘Go to hell.’ The words came out in a low growl, as if from deep down a hole in the ground. ‘Go to hell!’ She was shaking inside the sleeping bag. ‘I hate you. I hate you and your simple-minded cod philosophy and your crummy social skills and your shrunken little dick.’ That last bit came out in a shrieking wail. Then she collapsed on the sleeping mat, her muscles contracting twitchily and her tongue growing thick inside her mouth.
In the morning, he had gone.
‘AT THE DEEPEST LEVEL, my novels deal with the way we see ourselves reflected in the eyes of others while remaining fundamentally alone, and how we always long to become something more than just one being, more than a solitary brain inside an isolated organism.’
‘Would you agree that this longing is given a religious dimension in your books?’
‘Yes. Isn’t that what religion is, simply put? A fusion of our tendency to wish to be part of a greater entity and to yearn for meaning. What I am trying to say is there is only one contemporary and also widely accepted answer to the question about the meaning of life, which is that life is sufficiently meaningful in itself. It is easy to see why this last line of defence is often articulated as a demand or a duty. We are obliged to respect and protect life, so also to recognize the worth of one’s own and others’ existence. It’s one way of putting it.’
‘But surely interactions between individuals are also important in your books? And this offers us hope, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘And yet, how impossible it seems.’
‘How is that?’
‘There are so many fools out there.’
‘Ha ha.’
‘If only everyone had been like Jane Ashland.’
‘Indeed, yes… ha ha. Many of your protagonists are religious. Are you a believer?’
‘No, I’m not, but I think the characters I write about end up believing because they discover their limitations… that is, they become disillusioned. And then they turn to God.’
‘My impression is that you have always been well known at university level, in creative writing schools and among people who write for and read literary magazines. Is that right? A writers’ writer, in a sense? Would you agree?’
‘Well, yes. It’s a compliment, in a way. But then, maybe not.’
‘Now, though, with The Age of Plenitude, things have really… gone your way? As a journalist and a mother of two, I can’t help wondering how you find time for everything. You know, what with the writing and…’
‘And writing?’
‘You teach as well, don’t you?’
‘I have a good husband. Unlike you, I don’t have two children. Only one, and she is growing up fast now.’
‘How old is…?’
‘Her name is Julie, and she is eleven.’
‘And your husband?’
‘Greg.’
‘What does having a supportive family mean to you?’
‘Oh.’
‘Did the question sound stupid? Weekly magazine style?’
‘Not at all, it’s fine. Julie and Greg are my life. The rest is fiction.’
TO SEE THEM. In the shop, the park, a playground, at a distance. A certain way of running, or how a child pushes her hair behind her ear. The same sweater. Listening for someone who isn’t there, who has disappeared. At night, in the house, in your head. The inexplicable physical pains, the burning feeling of clothes against your skin that makes you rip them all off and stand naked in the bedroom. Climbing over the cemetery fence in the middle of the night because it is not possible to wait until they unlock the gate in the morning. Feeling hostile to everyone who grows older, somehow undeservedly. Feeling hostile towards everyone who is alive, yourself as well. Screaming in the car – people passing you in the next lane think you’re singing!
Hating someone on TV who talks about grieving with dignity. Hating TV. Hating the word accept. Hating everything that carries on regardless, indefatigably. Hating all those who avoid you as if you were infectious. Hating all those who don’t avoid you but fail to understand. Hating the spring, the flowers that dare to flourish.
THINKING BACK, the odd thing about creative writing studies was the fact that it was forbidden to write about pure accidents. She had instructed each new batch of expectant students: no accidents. Using literary power-language that seemed odd in retrospect, she had used the phrase Deus ex machina – God from outside the machine, a narrative trick that introduces an inconsequential or manufactured element into a story in order to solve a problem; an arbitrary turning point, unrelated to the traits of the characters and to the motivations you were meant to write about: pride, desire, egoism.
If students nonetheless produced pieces of writing where unexpected but fateful events occurred, she would explain that they had got stuck with the original storyline and picked a facile escape route, adding that, anyway, the solution was inherently unconvincing. Then she told them to write something different that would come across as more believable.
In other words, she wanted the students to write about an unreal world. Outside fiction, conditionality is a basic aspect of life. Generally, it is what people struggle with, at least when they are not fighting each other: If only I had more money… If I build this barrier tall enough… If I keep my head down and say the right things…
And then, with no permission, without respect or consideration, it hits you: the untreatable oesophageal cancer, the fire in the fuse cupboard, the armed, methamphetamine-maddened burglar who rambled along to your open bedroom window rather than your neighbour’s, the winter blizzard that dumped tons of snow on the substandard roof of the sports arena.
Conditionality creates the irreducible gap between the world as you wish it to be and what it actually is: a place ill suited to creatures in search of meaning.
SHE LACES UP HER BOOTS. They have Vibram soles and a layered construction which provides insulation but is also uniquely breathable. You can’t possibly die if you wear them. She keeps the clothes in her rucksack but discards everything else. Including the water bottle, because it was so long since she felt thirsty. She tries to stop shivering and put the sleeping bag back into its cover, but it’s like trying to manipulate it with a fist of part-thawed fish fingers. Then, she stands in the icy rain and shakes and clings to one of the tent poles through the thin top sheet and won’t let go. The anorak hood is tied around her head and she can see a tuft of hair sticking out and dripping rain down the collar. Her breath smells of ammonia. She recognizes it from the anorexic girl she shared a desk with during biology lessons in high school.
She ought to have every qualification in the book for grasping what it would mean to Dorothy and Robert if she were to die here. But the thought of them mourning her is still irritating. Ulf was right. What gets to her is that her parents will regard their emotions as meaningful in ways that have no relationship whatever to the world she observes now, a world that, quite unknowingly, is about to kill her – the wind, the endless rocks, the air saturated with water molecules and reflecting light at a wavelength that the human eye perceives as white.
She counts to nine, closes her left eye and nods politely to the stone, as one must in order to be safe when one passes it. Then she counts again, going down this time, and sets out with her neck bent. For each step she takes, new surroundings seem to be put in place, new shapes emerge out of the whiteness. Or, rather, more of the same. Unending ground-down stones on damp black peat, like a cobbled route unrolling in front of her.
Her idea was to work out a direction from the sky and walk straight ahead but a compass was the one thing she didn’t buy before the hike. Always something, isn’t there? She is pretty sure that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Her watch tells her it’s eight o’clock but it is a Seiko that winds itself when one�
��s arm swings, something her arm hasn’t done for several days. Greg gave it to her on her thirtieth birthday. She wonders if she shouldn’t take it off and leave it in some very visible place because it’s so valuable.
Once, she asked a student who did parachute jumping what it felt like to fall through a cloud. His answer disappointed her: he said there was no sudden transition between the cloud and the blue sky.
You’ve done roughly the same on the ground, he said. Just imagine wandering into a very low, very large fog bank.
If she tries to think like that, it also becomes possible to believe there is something outside the cloud. But it’s exhausting. She encounters some large boulders and has to walk around them. It is impossible to stick to a set direction.
She checks her watch. Now it says twelve o’clock but the brightest place is not right above her. Her steps create sodden echoes that make her look over her shoulder. She tries to speed up and walk more lightly but that’s worse still. There’s a sucking sound every time she lifts her heels. She can hear her own quick breathing while she wades through clumps of rushes that reach her hips. The water is seeping over the tops of her boots.
Then a mound appears some way away, a place where she can stand on dry ground. But she gets close to the mound faster than she expected and realizes that it is no more than a bump, just about large enough for the soles of two boots. She bends like a tightrope walker and, suddenly, she sees a light ahead of her. A searchlight, a head torch, perhaps the fluorescent glow of a rescue helicopter light. She splashes through the wet moorland, running towards the light that spreads and becomes stronger the closer she gets.
Just a few more steps and she sees it: it is the orange tent. A sentence comes to mind. She might have written it herself or perhaps read it somewhere or perhaps it has occurred to her at this moment.
There is a component of deprivation that is similar to starvation: a physical sensation of hollowness.
A WOMAN LOVES A MAN very much, he loves her very much, they cannot imagine a life without each other and, even though it is not said aloud or even clearly formulated in their thoughts, they take the fact that they have found each other and love each other and have created a good life together – the fact that love, after all, does exist – as proof that life as a whole has a hidden but beautiful pattern, that there is an inner order to the apparent chaos of the world around them, a lofty intention behind everything.
But these are their very last words to each other; this is how the two lovers say farewell:
‘But Tom has been waiting for that DVD for ages. It’s the one about the guy who builds himself a log cabin, yeah? And lives alone in Alaska?’
‘Sure. You do what you like.’
BEFORE THE COURT HEARING began, she had made a decision: she would meet the defendant’s eyes as often as possible. That her gaze would be reciprocated was something she had not taken into account. The first time she stood face to face with Scott Myers, outside Court 1A in Dane County Courthouse during the chaotic moments just before the hearing was due to start, he either pressed his chin against the narrow blue tie he had obviously borrowed, and mumbled something to his defence lawyer, or else used his superior height to stare placidly at a point above her head. When the doors opened, his lawyer escorted the client swiftly inside. They were followed by the defendant’s father, a man with a greying crew cut and arms that stretched the seams of his blazer, who pushed Myers from behind with his large hand, as if covering his son’s back in some kind of forward sporting move.
Scott Myers kept his eyes fixed on a point above hers during his statement to the effect that he turned down the right to a pretrial plea – there was no point in denying that he had committed the offence. It was all over before Jane had managed to catch his piggy blue eyes. She had seen these eyes many times on the web pages of the Green Bay Packers. Scott Myers was a tackle in the reserve team. He was twenty-four years old, six foot five tall and weighed in at three hundred pounds. He showed no signs of remorse.
Outside the courthouse, when Jane was standing on the steps with Robert and Dorothy, Scott Myers’s father had come over to her.
‘We pray for you, just as much as we pray for our son. I can’t hope that you will forgive him. We hope that God will.’
She noticed that her body weight increasingly rested on Robert, she felt his arm support her, then almost slacken before it held her up again.
‘What we’re doing now, we do because it’s our duty. Because he is our son. He has a right to defend himself.’
Scott Myers’s father said all this as if preparing to lead troops into battle. He held his hands together just in front of his stomach. Only his red-rimmed eyes and the way he twisted a large gold ring round and round on his finger gave away that he was speaking from a bottomless depth. Jane would on several occasions come to wish that he was on her side.
Going home in the car Dorothy said, ‘I understand that you couldn’t bear to answer him,’ which almost certainly meant the opposite. The catastrophic consequences of the accident had not penetrated into the barricaded, light-shy core of Dorothy’s mind, so she actually felt that Jane had been impolite.
‘I somehow couldn’t breathe, Mom,’ she explained.
For the duration of the court case, Jane was unable to distinguish clearly between fantasy and reality. She kept a thin notebook in her handbag – she had torn out half the pages and thrown them away because they had been used for notes on a novel – and wrote down information that had seemed important at the time, or that she had been told was important. The notes were unsystematic. One page contained a detailed description of the jury selection process, even including which day of the week it usually took place. It was followed by an almost entirely blank area devoted to a single word.
Ravens.
On the next page, written in letters that grew larger and larger:
That I write this down means…
The sentence ended there and the next two pages were empty until the entry of a date and a time and the words:
Jane A will make a victim impact statement. You will not be asked to do anything else.
Underneath, her name, scratched repeatedly in the same place until the pen had torn the paper.
She perceived her mind as a smooth black surface made from a material capable of registering a particle storm of impressions. In the evenings, lying in bed at home or in her parents’ house or in Tom and Vladlena’s guest room, she tried to visualize the defendant’s bull neck, round red cheeks and small goatee beard. She recalled the TV interview with one of the sheriff’s officers wearing a gold-braided cap and a hi-vis vest: he stood near the incident site and described the chain of events for a professionally appalled reporter from NBC. And she thought about the home page of the legal firm handling the defence, with its crass advertisement: Not all lawyers are used to the thrill of victory after an unconditional discharge. We’ll get you off the hook!
Then, she might feel another tightening of the airways, a few seconds of increased pulse rate, a pang of recognizable emotion, like a tattered little banner blowing in the wind at the far horizon beyond a desolate battlefield.
Myers’s defence neither apologized for his action nor attempted to modify his account. It wasn’t that kind of case. Both sides went in for plea bargaining. Myers would admit to all the essential elements in the prosecution’s case, but charges would not be pursued for minor breaches of law – such as leaving the scene of the accident. The prosecution wanted the case to be briskly concluded, without shades of doubt or pending options for appeal. As for Myers, any agreement would imply a reduced term of punishment. What such an outcome implied for Jane was obviously questionable. Her father held the not uncommon view that plea bargaining in cases such as this was typical of a legal system that was rotten to the core. Others have argued that if justice was seen to be done swiftly and in a satisfactory way, both parties would have the best prospect of moving on. As far as Jane was concerned, the first opinion was unintere
sting and the second one so naïve that she briefly recalled what it felt like to laugh.
Regardless, the judge quashed the proposal and the case got underway. The prosecution’s version of the events was identical to what she had been told by the sheriff’s department.
Scott Myers, Aaron Harlan, a former teammate, and Harlan’s girlfriend, Nicole Cason, had gone out together to a local bar, the Red Shed. According to Cason, called as a witness for the prosecution, Myers had drunk between three and six alcoholic drinks. She was certain it had been at least three because they had taken turns to buy the first rounds and she remembered having had just enough in cash to pay for the Long Island Iced Teas for Myers and Harlan, and a low-alcohol beer for herself – the bar did not accept credit cards. During the last hour before they left the Red Shed, Myers and Harlan played table football while Nicole sat in a booth chatting to an old friend. She saw Myers pass by three times with a beer in each hand, on his way from the counter to the corner with the games table. This made her assume that Myers might have consumed a total of six alcoholic drinks.
Around ten o’clock, Harlan got into a fight with another customer, an acquaintance from the time when he had been playing with the Wisconsin Badgers, the university team. Myers joined in the quarrel and became so loud that the female bouncer asked him to leave. Nicole Cason drove Myers and Harlan to the latter’s apartment in Darbo-Worthington. The plan was that Myers would stay the night. Nicole went home directly because the atmosphere in the car had become too much like a guys’ night out.
Once at Harlan’s place, Myers started drinking beers and tequila shots. Over the course of the evening, several other guests came and went. When Myers and Harlan were on their own again, they shared a gram of cocaine that Harlan had acquired the night before. In the police interrogation, Harlan had only been able to state how much cocaine he had bought and what they drank, as everything else had gone from his memory. The time when Myers had suddenly made up his mind to leave Harlan’s apartment had been determined from an incoherent text message sent by Harlan to Nicole Cason, in which he joked that he was so out of it, he couldn’t find Myers in his two-roomed apartment.