“As long as you pay, I won’t say,” I reply.
And so our mutual trust is secured with mutual suspicion. She gets her schoolbag and says good-bye with a silent look. I’m home alone, free, with my pockets full of money.
Everything downtown is gray; the red houses are red-gray, the yellow ones yellow-gray, the gray ones black-gray. I buy a stamp at the post office with my cap pulled over my face, just in case, so nobody recognizes me. But who would recognize me? Everybody I know is in school. I put the stamp on the envelope and start to put it in the mailbox. I hold it by the slot for a while — I don’t know why — but my heart is beating fast. Somebody is standing behind me waiting to get to the mailbox. I slide the envelope inside and hear it fall down gently. Did I definitely put the right letter in the envelope? Was Mom’s signature definitely on the letter? I feel a chill. There’s no turning back now. I round a corner, heading down to the harbor with my hands in my pockets and my chin to my chest; it feels like all eyes are on me. I walk hurriedly past the shipyard, then the steelworks, and then finally I feel relieved.
The man in the gas-station convenience store tells me the price for a Coke and a chocolate bar as if there is nothing more natural than a boy who should be in school standing here in the middle of the morning, buying a snack. He hands me the change without looking at me.
The shelves on the wall beside him are loaded with all kinds of things: windshield wipers, fan belts, oil cans, cotton cloths, and tool kits. Then there’s one shelf full of plastic toys, and there’s a red glider plane with a separate handle and a thick rubber string so it can be shot high in the air. I take it from the shelf and put it on the table. Then the man looks me in the eye. I hand him the money.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”
“We have a day off,” I say without hesitating.
“And what? Pockets full of money?” he says, watching me suspiciously.
“I’m buying this for my dad,” I say, holding the Coke up. “He said I could buy myself something too.”
“OK, then,” he says, pushing the plane and my change across the counter toward me.
I put everything in my pockets and walk out toward my hollow. I look over my shoulder to check if he’s watching me, but he’s nowhere to be seen. It is so easy to lie, so terribly easy. And when you’ve got so much to hide, you can lie so convincingly that you almost start to believe it yourself. Then you give the best performance.
I honestly believe that I’m taking Coke and chocolate to my father, even though there aren’t any cargo ships in the docks and Dad is far out at sea. It’s just like people who believe in God, even though he doesn’t exist. And just like the people who go to church to eat a wafer and sip wine in memory of Jesus, because they believe in him, I sit down in my hollow sipping the Coke and chomping away at the chocolate bar, thinking of my father. He might as well be in heaven; although he is with me, I’m not with him. Half of me is from my father, and so my father is with me. So I wasn’t really lying when I told the man I was buying this for my father. This proves that lies can be the honest truth, when you think about it. But my cousin lies to her parents and my mom, just so she can kiss some stupid boy. She’s just a sex-crazed female whose sole objective is to find a male to satisfy her burning longings. Probably a close relative to the spider who eats her mate after he’s delivered. Is this love, then? To fondle and squeeze and cuddle like a slimy mollusk? Such brutal uncleanliness is certainly the poorest excuse for love there ever was.
Where the rocks end, the sandy beach begins, reaching as far as the eye can see. I run on the beach, for warmth. It’s chilly sitting in my hollow drinking Coke. I fasten the wings to my glider, tie the rubber band to the handle, and shoot it into the air. It flies, red and shiny under the blue-gray clouds, and glides high above the beach. I run after it, run from the small waves searching the sand, run and run over seaweed and kelp, run until I see it lower and glide gracefully down, landing next to a gray stone. I pick it up, put the rubber band in the hook on its belly, and shoot it up into the sky again, high and far, higher than the seagulls, higher, higher, until it rests its wings on the mild breeze, flying straight in the air, soaring forward, high above the sand, high above everything.
I eat lunch in my hollow — the sandwich that Mom made this morning. I’m a free man, looking over the blue bay like a king over his realm. I throw the leftovers to my subjects, the seagulls, who dive down and grab the pieces in the air with a strong flutter of wings, cackling and fighting; that’s their lot.
They fight over the bread crumbs till everything is eaten, then they hang around for a while, floating in the air over the rocks in hope of some more, but then they lose interest and fly back to the sewage outlet.
I’m warm after running on the beach, and it’s nice to sit in the shelter of my hollow and listen to the lapping of the waves, listen to how they trickle between the rocks. The long-haired seaweed moves lazily to and fro just beneath the surface, and farther out on the bay, a group of eider ducks, Somateria mollissima, rises and falls on the undercurrent.
I leaf through my writing pad and read the poems to Clara, each one a sigh from the deepest dungeons of my heart. I think that when I see her in a dream, our souls are meeting. I know it. Even though she laughs with Tommy and makes it look like she thinks he’s exciting, I am the one in her heart. It’s just so difficult for her to show it. Nobody can understand that better than me.
A loud cackle from a gull tears me from my thoughts. On a rock, not very far away, sits a huge white gull with a black back, Larus marinus, looking at me threateningly. He opens his beak and hisses and cackles, loud and clear. He isn’t afraid of me in the least and shows no sign of flying away. He is king here, not me. I feel a chilling tingle in my legs; I want to run away but I don’t dare to move. He stares at me with one flaming-yellow eye. The coal-black pupil, round like a shirt button, stares without blinking: cold, unscrupulous, merciless. Then he cackles, He’s here! The traitor! The truant! Come and see!
He fixes this one eye on me and screams, Away with you! Be gone! To school, to school, to school!
His wings spread out like two huge swords and beat heavily at the air, flapping and pounding, until I’ve had enough. I jump to my feet and run. I fall on the rocks, scraping the skin on my hands and knees. I push myself onward, sweating and scared, my heart jumping out of my chest, not looking back, sensing only his yellow beak snapping right at the nape of my neck.
My heart doesn’t beat normally again until I’m downtown strolling the streets, jingling the coins in my pocket. I wander into the bookstore. There is a thick scent of paper and pipe tobacco. A man with gray hair sits behind the desk. He’s wearing a white shirt and a black vest, and he is talking on the phone when I come in. He notices me, nods in a friendly manner, and continues to talk on the phone. I walk farther into the store, looking at the shelves; there are loads of books here, old books that many hands have touched and caressed, new books that are waiting for someone to open them up and disappear into the world that they hold inside them. Right at the back of the store are shelves of magazines, and there among them is the latest issue of National Geographic. Next to it are the women’s magazines Mom loves so much, in a long row. On the top shelf are magazines with naked girls on the cover.
I quickly grab National Geographic and start leafing through it, pretending to be reading, but my eyes are searching upward, up naked legs, up naked stomachs, up between large breasts. The old guy says good-bye on the phone. Without thinking twice, I reach up, snatch a magazine from the top shelf, and shove it inside my jacket. At the same instant, I hear him put the phone on the hook. I lower my head into the National Geographic, put on my most serious natural-scientist face, frown a little, and pretend I’m reading a very interesting article about kangaroos in Australia. I can’t see the words for the fog in my eyes; I can’t wait to get out, out, out.
“Are you interested in these kinds of magazines?” the man asks, and for a terrible split second I think
he means the ones up on the top shelf, but he must be talking about National Geographic.
“Yes,” I say, but feel instantly that I have to add something, something spicy enough and so convincing that he won’t dream of suspecting me of anything, so he won’t imagine that I even noticed the magazines on the top shelf.
“My dad is actually a subscriber,” I say. “But we have just moved, so the latest issue hasn’t arrived yet,” I add in a very calm way.
“And you read this?” he asks with the emphasis on you like it’s a miracle that a thirteen-year-old boy is sufficiently interested in such things to actually read about them.
“Yeah, sure,” I say, and force a smile to show him that my interest in natural history goes without saying.
“I’ll say,” he sighs. “And I thought that old men like myself were the only admirers of that magazine.”
But now I feel myself beginning to soar inside, so while I walk casually to the desk, pay for the magazine, watch him take the money, open the register, put the coins in their appropriate compartments, and close it again, I jabber away without a single pause.
“Yeah, you know, I am the president of the Natural History Club at school, and we’re actually publishing a magazine very similar, you know. And my friend, well, he’s in the club — he’s the secretary, actually, and he has this fabulous camera and he’s always taking photographs, he even took a photo of a falcon, you know, a real-live falcon. That will be in the magazine, the picture of the falcon, you see, in the first issue that we publish.”
“You don’t say,” the old man says, smiling, when I finish.
My face is very warm and I’m sure I’m all red in the face when I raise my hand and say good-bye and walk out. He nods, holding his pipe between his teeth. There’s a mysterious gleam in his eyes; I’m sure he’s suppressing a grin. I press the National Geographic to my chest, mostly to stop the porn magazine from falling out from under my jacket, and then walk out stiffly like a windup toy. I stumble over the threshold and start to run as fast as I can, convinced that he’s found me out and is about to call the police.
When I’ve gone far enough, I peek around a corner and see him standing outside his store, looking around him with his pipe in his mouth. Then he bends down to pick something up and stands for a while looking at it. It’s my red glider. It must have fallen from my pocket when I ran. The old guy looks up and down the street, takes the pipe out of his mouth, and scratches his gray head with the mouthpiece, looks at the glider, shakes his head, and disappears into the store.
What a stupid mistake — my glider lost forever. One thing is certain: I can’t be seen in the neighborhood of this store ever again. At least not until I’ve grown a beard.
I’ve hardly closed the door behind me when a key turns in the lock and Gertrude appears, chewing gum with a tired look on her face and so feeble she doesn’t even bother to say hi. I hurriedly take Tintin from my bookcase, slide the magazine from under my jacket, throw it inside the book, and jam it back in the bookcase.
All through supper, Gertrude gives me dark looks, but I pretend not to notice. She can think what she wants, as long as she pays up. One thing is certain, though: she doesn’t trust me. After supper, she offers to do the dishes. It makes Mom really happy, and she sits down at the table lighting a cigarette.
I can’t wait for the evening to pass. After I’ve forced myself to watch the news, I pretend I’m sleepy and go to bed, leaving Mom and Gertrude in the living room. It is obvious that Gertrude is not going to leave me and Mom on our own for a while, just in case.
I hold Tintin on the bed in front of me. The magazine nests inside, and I leaf slowly through it with trembling fingers. I feel disgusting but at the same time really cool. This is the worst crime, the lowest place a man can fall: looking at pictures of naked girls.
To begin with, I’m amazed by the somewhat unnatural poses, but at the same time, I’m enchanted by the biological wonder that the female body most certainly is. My cheeks are burning, and I’m dripping sweat in the most unlikely places. I turn the pages, scrutinizing every picture, every spread, gobbling it all up with my eyes. There’s a new girl on almost every page, but somehow they all have the same expression: eyes half open, mouths twisted, teeth tight together. Some are on all fours, swaying and twisting with their heads upward and their butts out in the air like cats stretching. It’s like they’ve been electrocuted at the exact moment the picture was taken. The astonishing world of the flesh makes me confused and aroused, limp and tense. I don’t notice Gertrude come into the room until she’s standing by the door to her room, looking at me. I look up. My face is a shimmering blaze.
“Still into comics, huh?” she asks.
I nod and pretend to go on reading Tintin, but instead my eyes fall right between the legs of Eliza, 22, art student, currently a cocktail waitress.
“Idiot,” she says, and disappears into her room.
I turn off the lamp, take my flashlight out of the drawer, slide under the comforter with the magazine, and pull the comforter over my head. Under the comforter the small beam of light creates mysterious shadows; I’m like a Stone Age man in his cave. The girls on the pages seem to come alive in the half-light, crawl out on the sheet, and writhe with pain, stretching their long fingers to the ceiling of the cave, tormented by the burning in their flesh, their sighs and moans echoing in my ears. They’re cruel and gentle simultaneously, pulling me closer to them, closer, closer, until I disappear into their restless embraces, completely mad and enchanted, mesmerized and insane, locked up in the Stone-Age man’s cave, where all emotions and thoughts are wiped out and only the raw, bloodthirsty instinct of the beast rules, suffocating everything that’s tender and beautiful in my consciousness with its ever-burning lava of lust.
I feel a sharp kick in my lower stomach, and a scorching electric wave twists and turns up my spine, blowing my brain into pieces.
For a long time I lie still, sweating and out of breath, in a coma. When I finally come to my senses, I stick my head out from under the comforter. The only thing I hear is the low bubbling sound from the water pump in my fish tank; apart from that, everything is quiet. I jam the magazine under the mattress, turn myself to the wall, and draw my knees up to my chin. The sweat cools down on my skin, and I shudder. I am ashamed. It feels like I’m lying stark naked in the wilderness, utterly alone, despised by everyone. These beauty queens are nothing but delusion and deception. Witches that lay their snares for humans, just to lead them into eternal damnation. I was lured by their sweet promises, but they lured me out into the desert, where nothing awaits me but certain death. And there I die.
Is man a beast or a civilized being? Can one behave like a beast but still be civilized at the same time? Are we just human beings on the inside but beasts on the outside? Is it beastly behavior to fiddle with oneself, or is it human behavior? I’ve seen cats and dogs do it, but that’s instinct; that’s cleanliness. What can it be called, what I’ve done? It’s not cleanliness, but is it instinct? Is it maybe a natural step on the road to becoming a grown-up? But then why do I feel so bad? Why do I feel like a lesser human being? I’m so small I disappear into my bed, blend into the floral pattern on my sheets, feel awkward with every move I make, blush from listening to my own breath. I don’t dare to open my eyes because I know I’ll suffocate from shyness just seeing my own body, my hands, my fingers, my face in the mirror. I wish something would happen, something terrible and overwhelming, so I could stop thinking about this. If only there were a volcanic eruption or a tsunami. Then nobody would bother speculating why I look so strange. Because what has happened must be written all over my face. I should have jumped into the ocean the other day when I was in the mood. Now I don’t dare to get out of bed ever again. I’m just going to lie here, completely still, with my eyes closed, and wait — wait until everything has changed, everything’s different, until I’m sixteen or eighteen or something.
From the kitchen, I can hear Mom’s and Auntie Carol�
��s voices. It’s Saturday morning, and Carol has arrived for a cup of coffee. On Saturdays she delivers Business Week to the fancy houses on the west side of town because she claims it’s healthy exercise. As it happens, she’s a subscriber to The Socialist Worker newspaper, because she’s left-wing, but maybe delivering The Socialist Worker isn’t quite as healthy, I don’t know, but I’ve always found it a strange policy to actually be helping the enemy spread his word. But Carol’s way of seeing it is probably that this way she’s making Business Week pay for her subscription to The Socialist Worker. It would be just like her to reason like that. She and Mom agree on everything. They agree, for example, that the prime minister is a jerk and that the right-wingers are the same old pains in the asses, out to line the pockets of the rich. They can rant on endlessly about this and about the countless ways the powers that be conspire against them.
Their voices carry up the stairs and into my room, and I pull the comforter down so I can hear what they’re talking about properly. They’re probably chattering about everything that’s wrong with society — criminals in government, criminals in the unions, and criminal employers.
“He can thank his maker that he’s still alive,” Carol says.
This is the tone of voice she uses when she’s talking about my father, and I sit up in bed and listen harder.
“I don’t understand what he’s doing out on that ship anyway, with that woman in her condition,” she says very clearly.
“Well, it’s a good salary, isn’t it?” Mom says in a low voice.
“Of course is it,” Carol says. “You don’t think a woman like that would give up a man like my brother; oh, no, they know how to nail them, first chance they get.”
“It takes two,” Mom says, even lower than before.
I climb quickly and silently out of bed and creep to the top of the stairs to eavesdrop. Mom offers Carol more coffee, and then there’s just the sound of cups hitting saucers.
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