Love

by Hanne Ørstavik

  “You’re drooling on the seat.”

  Her voice sounds tired. He feels stiff, as if he’s been asleep for some time. His mouth is dry. He uses the paper towels scrunched up in his hand to wipe his cheek and chin. The spit feels cold against his skin.

  “I don’t normally,” he says. “Have we been stopped long?”

  He thinks to himself that if they haven’t then he won’t have said much in his sleep, he talks in his sleep sometimes and he doesn’t want her to hear things he might say. He tries not to blink.

  “I don’t know.”

  She takes a cigarette out of a packet on the dashboard, lights up and leans back against the headrest. She blows the smoke out in rings while staring out at the road in front. The heater hums. He imagines they’re sitting inside a snow globe, Vibeke gave him an old one from when her mother was a little girl, he keeps it on his bedside table, and when he shakes it white flakes of something that looks like snow fall on the little houses inside.

  “A quarter of an hour, something like that. Want a smoke?”

  He wonders what she means, she knows how old he is. At school they say you die from it. He told Vibeke, she said some of us have to die so others can live and enjoy, or something like that.

  “My mom smokes,” he says.

  “It makes your hair fall out,” says the woman, pointing at her fuzzy hair with a smile.

  “Not my mom’s. Hers is really long and black, it goes all the way down to her belly button.” I’ve got the hair of a horse, Jon.

  He wonders if you get less smoke inside you if you only breathe through your mouth and keep your nostrils closed. He’s sure it wouldn’t taste of anything if that was what you did.

  “She wears a little diamond in her nose too, doesn’t she, your mom?” the woman says.

  “Yes,” says Jon. “It’s not a real diamond though, it just looks like one. She says she’s going to buy a real one when she gets rich. Do you know my mom?”

  “I’m psychic,” she says.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s when you see people in your mind that you don’t know, that sort of thing. It’s secret.”

  He doesn’t believe her, but doesn’t want to say so.

  She takes a drag of the cigarette then hands it to him. He reaches out and scissors his fingers around the filter. She guides his hand with hers. He puts the cigarette between his lips and sucks. He can smell her fingers, he thinks she must use lotion of some kind. He exhales, blowing the smoke out onto his hand and hers. The air greys in front of his eyes. He expects to cough but doesn’t. He thought it would make him choke. Is he a smoker now? She removes her hand, studying his reactions. He takes a puff while she lights up another. She leans back in her seat, he does the same. They stare out ahead, through the windshield at the snow-covered road. There haven’t been any cars since he woke up. He holds the cigarette between his index finger and thumb, and thinks one day he’ll take his driving test.

  THE VOCALIST IN THE BAND mumbles something into the microphone in a deep voice. They’re finished for the night. The audience clap and the girls start packing their gear. Someone puts a CD on. The music is soft and gentle, Vibeke thinks it must be jazz of some sort. She watches the girl with the red hair as she puts her bass away in a case lined with sheepskin. She looks at Tom, his eyes are closed as he sips his beer. He’s still standing back against the bar. She asks him what he’s thinking about. He doesn’t seem to notice she’s speaking to him. She angles forward, stretching onto her tiptoes, and asks him again, her lips to his ear.

  “Summer,” he says without opening his eyes.

  The thought makes her feel buoyant. She thinks about it too, they’ve known nothing but snow since they moved here. She wonders what it’s like when it’s warm, when the fells are streaked with color and the sun shines. She imagines sitting outside under the shade of a tree. She studies him and finds she likes him with his eyes shut too, immersed in his own world. He could sit in the other chair. With glasses on, she thinks, most likely he wears glasses to read. Round ones with wire rims. She wonders if he reads quickly or slowly. She feels an urge to ask. She thinks the speed at which a person reads says something about the kind of rhythm they possess, the way they are in life.

  Her attention is distracted by some people leaving. They’ve left the door open while they say their goodbyes and give each other hugs. Someone closes it. Vibeke thinks it’ll be open again in a second. Then there he is all of a sudden, the young man from the café. He leans up to a young girl with blond hair and says something that makes her laugh. Vibeke thinks she can’t be more than seventeen.

  The woman from social security clutches her boyfriend’s hand. They bump into the blond-haired girl on their way out. She doesn’t seem to notice. A lot of people left when the band stopped playing, but there’s still quite a few hanging around. The boyfriend holds the door for her. Vibeke sees her shudder as she goes out into the cold, as if her thinking had lagged behind and left her unprepared. She thinks of their own drive home, how good it feels to be going home with someone instead of alone. She looks at Tom leaning against the bar. His eyes are still closed. He breathes calmly through his nose, inhaling deeply. She admires the way he can relax. He looks almost like he’s asleep. She wishes she could lie in a bed and watch him.

  “What are we waiting for?” she says, and feels a reflex in her hand wanting to smooth his hair. She stops herself, not wishing to encroach on his space. Never encroach.

  “Can’t we go now?”

  Her voice is fuller than before, a dark and sensual resonance drawn from her diaphragm. He turns back around to face the bar, a half-liter glass in front of him on a beer mat advertizing a local big band.

  “I still need to get this down.”

  He raises his glass to her with a glance and a little nod. It’s still half-full. She thinks his eyes look glazed. Perhaps he’s not all there. He takes a sip and licks his upper lip, looking over her shoulder at the people leaving.

  The music’s been turned down. The girl behind the bar is busy putting clean glasses away in the racks above their heads. They chink together. Someone scrapes a chair. The stool beside him is vacated. She hoists herself up and sits down.

  Smoke smells different when it’s your own, Jon thinks. He turns his head slightly and looks at the woman with the short hair. She looks like a man again now that she’s got her mouth closed, her jawbone is more prominent. He sees her cheek muscles tighten and release, tighten and release, like a pulse. He tries doing the same to see what it feels like, clenching his teeth and letting go. He’s not quite sure he’s doing it right. It makes his jaw tired, and he makes a face to loosen up. She turns her head and looks at him, tightening and releasing. She doesn’t know she’s doing it, he says to himself. He thinks of a wildlife program he saw on TV about lizards in the desert, a lot of them kept doing this thing with their neck, he remembers the voice saying it was an instinct, something they did before pouncing on their prey. He closes his eyes so he wouldn’t see. He hears the hum of the heater. He decides to count how many constellations he knows. He counts them quietly. When he can’t think of any more he opens his eyes.

  She looks out the window on his side. She’s stopped clenching now, he thinks she just looks tired again. He turns around to see what she’s looking at. There’s nothing there, only forest.

  “A deserted road, in the middle of the forest, in the middle of the night.”

  She looks out at the trees as she speaks, shifting her gaze toward him as her words trail off.

  “The town’s just a bit further on, there’s a gas station by the turn-off,” says Jon. “It doesn’t matter though. My mum’s probably home by now.”

  “Mommy, mommy,” she mocks, in a voice like a child’s.

  He thinks about one of the music videos he saw at the girl’s house. The lady who was the singer was in a car with the man driving, it was a foreign country, an island in Italy perhaps. They drove all afternoon and it was starti
ng to get dark when this big house came into view at the top of a hill. The road got worse and the car nearly got stuck, there was a close-up of one of the wheels spinning in the mud. Eventually, they made it around the final bend up to the house and outside there was a battered sign saying Hotel. The place was creepy, there was no one around and no lights on anywhere. But then when the man and the singer lady carried their suitcases into the reception some people in uniform came out to meet them. That was the end.

  “Have people got snowmobiles here?” the woman asks.

  “Yes,” says Jon.

  “Why don’t they use them then? You’d think it’d be more practical,” she says. “I haven’t seen a single one.”

  “I don’t know,” says Jon.

  “What’s the point of having them if they don’t get used?”

  He thinks about the snowmobiles he’s seen parked outside the houses. Usually they’re under tarps, and always on the side facing the forest. Their owners put one foot on the running board and their other knee on the seat, then they pull the starter cord and drive off, half crouching, half standing, into the trees and away. Sometimes in the night he gets woken up by the sound of a snowmobile starting up and setting off, or another coming back, returning home. The first few times he thought the sound they made was like a machine gun.

  “They do get used, a lot of people use them in fact. But we haven’t got one. Vibeke doesn’t like being out in the snow. I have skates though,” says Jon. “And I know a man who won the Kalottløpet before the war. His skates are in a box in the basement.”

  “ALL RIGHT, LET’S GO,” says Tom.

  He strides toward the door, Vibeke feels she ought to have gone to the bathroom. The room’s almost empty. The house lights have been switched on. She sees the walls are unevenly painted and grubby, there’s dust all along the chair rail. Tom steps out, peering into the street as he holds the door for her. She clenches her coat at the collar, checking with her other hand to make sure she’s remembered her gloves and her bag.

  Some other people follow them out, she hears the door close again and footsteps as they trudge away.

  The cold feels rough against her face. The snow is heaped up at the curbsides. Across the road, a van’s been left hemmed in by the snow plow.

  She pauses at the silence. Listen, she wants to say, listen to how quiet it is. She looks up at the sky. She can no longer see the stars. It must have clouded over. He walks toward the car. She sees his hair isn’t cut straight at the neck.

  “I need the bathroom,” she says.

  Tom stops. He breathes out heavily. She turns to go back inside but finds the door locked. She knocks.

  He stands back and looks down the road. His shoulders are slightly rounded. She feels the cold against her throat. A car that’s been parked facing the sidewalk backs out into the road. The white reversing lights go out and it pulls away. It’s a police car, one of the old square ones.

  The girl from behind the bar unlocks the door, holding it open with her arm outstretched. She asks what they want. Vibeke says she needs the bathroom, she forgot to go and they’ve got a drive ahead of them. The girl nods before she’s finished explaining, and steps aside for her to get past. Vibeke senses her looking at Tom.

  Think ten nice thoughts, she tells herself as she sits down on the toilet. The tiles on the floor are a pattern of alternating green and blue. The wastebasket next to the sink is full to the brim, the floor littered with paper towels. Someone’s blotted their lipstick on one, she can see the print of their lips. She brushes her hair again. It frames her face in the mirror. Not bad, she thinks, and smiles. Not bad at all.

  When she comes back out, Tom and the girl are standing at the corner of the bar, each with a little glass in front of them, talking softly. Vibeke stands on the narrow stage where the band was playing. Make him turn and see me. You look gorgeous. She can’t hear what they’re saying. She steps down and goes up to them. The girl says hi and asks if she’d like something. Vibeke shakes her head. She feels a bit nauseous, she wonders if it’s too much smoking again. She lingers at Tom’s side, listening to the girl telling him about an ice-fishing competition at a nearby lake. The Storvannet. Vibeke has heard about it at work. You can’t see it from the highway, but apparently it’s just on the other side. There’s a particular spot where cars are often parked, she thinks it must be there. Tom throws in comments about jigs and tackle, various techniques. She didn’t know he was interested.

  She looks up at the ceiling. There’s a shiny fan in the middle. It’s not moving. The planks are painted brown, with black and metal trim.

  The woman with the short hair has fallen asleep. Her mouth is closed. Jon thinks maybe her teeth are false. He’s not tired anymore and he doesn’t know what to do now on his own. I’m closing the door now. You’re a big boy, the dark’s nothing to be scared of. What you’re scared of is inside you. You’ve got to choose, Jon, decide where to invest your energy. If you want to be scared, you will be. If not, all you have to do is think of something else. I’m closing the door now. Sleep tight. He stares out at the forest. His eyes are used to the dark now, the trees at the roadside stand out clearly. It feels like he hasn’t blinked for some time. Maybe it’s wearing off, he thinks. Maybe it’s going away right at this moment. He sees a pattern of indentations in the snow by the car. He thinks they must be animal tracks.

  Vibeke leaves them to it and goes outside, pulling the door shut behind her as she steps out.

  The street lights have gone out, they switch them off in the middle of the night here. Only the neon signs illuminate the dark, the shop windows, an advertising sign over at the bank. She thinks of how different everywhere looks in the lightless hours. She read about it once in a book, she can’t remember the title. She thinks if she’d only ever been here at night and came back in the day she probably wouldn’t recognize it.

  She pulls her gloves out of her coat pocket and puts them on before wrapping her scarf snugly around her neck. I’ll leave him alone for a bit, she thinks, that way he’ll see how generous I am. He can have all the space he needs with me. We can’t be all things to each other, no one can. I’m showing him more of me now than if I’d stayed.

  She goes toward the car. The wind has started to blow, the snow whips along the ground.

  At first she thinks the car door’s locked, but then when she presses more firmly and pulls harder on the handle it opens.

  The glove compartment drops open again, he stops it with his left hand so the noise won’t wake her up. He feels hungry. He often gets up to eat in the night. The light’s always on outside his room, shining up the stairs. He wonders if Vibeke forgets to switch it off. He cuts himself some bread and spreads something on before putting everything back in its place, sweeping the crumbs off the counter into his hand and dropping them in the sink. Then he sits down at the kitchen table and looks out at the road while he eats. He especially likes to sit there when it’s snowing; he’ll put the radio on low then and listen to the night shows, the requests, the soft, mellow voices.

  He looks at her. She’s still asleep. He finds some receipts and some documents from an insurance company, some papers with the funfair’s logo in the top right-hand corner. There’s a postcard too. It shows a green entrance door with red flowers all around it, in the window is a yellow vase with a single stalk. On the other side there’s some writing in a language he can’t understand. At the back of the glove compartment he finds a cell phone. He takes it out and flips it open. He thinks about calling home. He thinks about Vibeke, she’s bound to be home by now; the cake will be ready, maybe she’s already gone to bed. If he calls he’ll wake her up. She doesn’t like being on the phone. I like to see who I’m talking to. If it rings in the afternoon she gets him to answer. Afterwards she’ll ask who it was, what their voice sounded like, what they said when he told them she wasn’t in. Sometimes she’ll wait a bit, then call them back. Don’t let others govern your time. He closes the phone again and puts it back.
She’d only wonder who it was, she probably thinks I’m in bed asleep.

  There are some coins in the glove compartment too, but he doesn’t have the courage to take them in case the woman wakes up.

  IT FEELS WARMER INSIDE the car than out, it must be the wind. Then immediately she senses the cold. It doesn’t come creeping, the way it’s supposed to, it’s just there. Encasing her. She feels like she’s freezing to the bone, yet tells herself to stick it out and wait until he comes. Here I am, near and serene. Facing away from the bar entrance she can’t see if he’s coming or not. She closes her eyes and forces herself to sit back and relax.

  She wonders what he’s trying to say by making her wait. Maybe he’s testing her, trying to find her limit. Something he can relate to. But he can relate to me the way I am, she thinks to herself. What’s wrong with using language? She can feel the thought, a build-up of pressure above her left eyebrow. She locates it precisely with her finger and massages for a moment before the tenderness makes her stop.

  She doesn’t hear him coming until a second or two before he opens the door. It startles her. She’d expected having to wait some time, but now he’s back already.

  He looks at her, glancing then by turn at the dashboard, the back seats, the floor, her feet, the gear lever, the pedals. As if he’s making sure everything’s still there, she thinks.

  He says nothing, but gets in and starts patting his pockets. Vibeke recalls him doing the same thing when they first met at the fair. In a way, she knows him already; she sees him from an angle from which he can never see himself. He arches off the seat and feels in his back pockets without finding what he’s looking for, and sits down again. He pats the breast pocket of his shirt one more time under his sweater and finds the car keys there. She doesn’t say anything either. She closes her eyes again as he turns the ignition and the car starts. The heater blasts air. He reverses out into the road, thrusts the car into gear and drives back the way they came. Vibeke sees the lights in the café have been turned off as they go past.