by Reif Larsen
The heat was beginning to get to her. She ran a finger across a sweat-soaked eyebrow.
“Brusa seems to admire you a lot,” she said. “He was the one who recommended we come here.”
“Yes, well, from afar, one can admire one’s nemesis.”
“Nemesis?”
“Perhaps this is a bad translation. In Norwegian we say konkurrent. And this means ‘opponent,’ but it also means ‘someone who is a part of you.’”
“Your English is very good.”
“Of course,” he said. “I’m Norwegian.”
She suddenly had the urge to ask Leif about Per Røed-Larsen and why he might not have wanted them to come, but then she would have had to reveal to Kermin that she had kept the telegram from him. She would have to acknowledge that the telegram had been real.
Instead she said: “So you started a school up here?”
“Not quite,” Leif said. He dipped the ladle into the water again. Charlene wanted to tell him not to do it, but he was already dousing the rocks. The air grew thick with vapor. Charlene’s head started to swim. “At first, when the war was still on, it was a resistance movement. But not with weapons. We were interested in issues of atomics, theater, the avant-garde. You know, we were still young then. We thought we could change everything by staging a little happening about nuclear fission and cultural decimation on the tundra. There was no audience. No one even knew we existed. But I’ve come to learn that this isn’t how you win a war. And it isn’t what the people needed. At the end of the war, this whole area was completely destroyed by the Nazis. Can you imagine? First there was a town, and then there was nothing. Just ashes, bent metal, these terrible memories. For a while there, that’s all there was up here. Terrible, terrible memories. We are lucky memories die with those who have them.”
The heat was causing Charlene’s vision to collapse in on itself.
“I’m sorry. I can’t do it anymore. I have to get out,” she said. “I’m going to check on Radar.”
“Yes, it takes some getting used to,” he said. “But it will cure you of almost anything. I hardly notice the heat anymore.”
To her horror, she found Radar asleep amid a swarm of mosquitoes. How stupid she had been to leave him unattended! She swatted angrily at the insects. Attacking her poor, helpless child—how dare they? The mosquitoes responded to her attacks by gleefully turning their attention to her.
“I’m sorry,” Leif said, emerging from the sauna pink and steaming. “I should’ve warned you about the myggs. They can be nasty this time of year. They have a short period to do their damage, and they take their job very seriously. A reindeer can lose two liters of blood per day.”
They flip-flopped back to the main lodge. Now, suddenly, all Charlene could think about were the swarms of mosquitoes dive-bombing their heads. She protectively enshrouded Radar with a towel as they passed a group of men filming what looked like a collection of headless, green-skinned dolls.
From beneath his towel, Radar pointed to the dolls. “Halfway oop or down de stairs,” he said.
“Yes. That’s like Robin’s song, isn’t it?” Charlene sang: “Halfway down the stairs is a stair where I sit. There isn’t any stair quite like it.”
“It isn’t really anywhere, it’s somewhere else instead.” Leif completed the verse. “God bless the Muppets, eh? Jim Henson’s a bit of a deity around here.”
“Where dere heads go?” Radar asked.
“An excellent question, my friend. One that we’re trying to figure out as we speak,” Leif said. “Do you know where we put them?”
“Nooo,” Radar said shyly.
Leif waved at the film crew, but the men were too embroiled in an animated argument to respond. One of them flicked at a green doll, and its body parts flew in all directions. Then the man pulled at an invisible string and the parts returned, the doll whole again. This demonstration calmed the group; they all laughed and then looked up and waved back at Leif.
Charlene noticed a tall, towheaded boy standing among the men.
“Who’s the kid?” she asked.
“Oh, that’s Lars. The first and only child to be born in the Bjørnens Hule. Fortunately, he has caught the bug from his father.”
“Is that you?”
Leif laughed. “No, no. I’m childless, partnerless. My work is my life. My family are these men here. I barely have time to breathe. His father’s the famous Jens Røed-Larsen.”
“Røed-Larsen?” said Charlene.
“That’s right.”
“Any relation to Per Røed-Larsen?” She butchered the rolling ø.
“You know Per?” Leif’s face clouded over.
“No, no,” Charlene said. “I’ve only . . . I’ve only read his work.”
“And?”
“I’m not sure what to think.”
“Per’s an interesting character. A bit of a groupie, one must say, though you can’t blame him. Jens had a family before he came here. Per is Jens’s other son. And then Jens abandoned him for us, and Per has never quite gotten over it.”
“Abandoned him?”
“Per stayed in Oslo with his mother. And now he has become obsessed with us. He’s writing our history, you see. Writing it before we’ve even managed to make history.”
“So then Lars . . .” She stared at the boy holding one of the green dolls.
“Is from a different woman, yes. Siri. They met here. You’ll probably see her around.”
“How scandalous,” said Charlene.
Leif shrugged. “Strange things happen this far north. I cannot control what others do or say. I can only look after myself.”
In the main lodge, they drank black tea and sampled some local Lapland sautéed reindeer meat that smelled to Charlene of old leather jacket and a particular hairspray that she recognized from somewhere deep in her memory. This was undercut by a lingering aroma of ancient peat moss, finished with a touch of lard that had recently turned. She forced herself to try the meat out of politesse. It was delicious. Salty and rich and sweet all at once. It tasted of wet tundra, of pumping leg muscles, of crystallized sweat on the hide.
“Not so bad, yeah?” Leif chewed. “We call it finnbiff. An acquired taste, but then everything is acquired north of the Arctic Circle.”
“I have a sensitive nose, that’s all,” she said.
“Alas, I’ve never had a sense of smell,” said Leif. “Though one gets used to it and seeks pleasure in other delights.”
Radar licked at the meat on his plate and then recoiled. “Ewwww, ’lectric poop,” he said and hid his face in Charlene’s lap.
Leif laughed.
“Sorry,” said Charlene. “He can be so picky.”
“Not at all. The boy knows what he wants, that’s all. An admirable quality.”
Charlene took a breath. “Thank you, Mr. . . . Dr. Holtsmark, for all of your hospitality.” She swept her arm around the room.
“Please,” he said. “Call me Leif.”
“Okay,” she said. “Leif, then. May I ask what you propose?”
“Propose?”
She looked at Kermin. “To do with our son.”
He wiped at his lips with a napkin. “Let me show you something.”
He got up and fetched a smooth, white rectangular cube with four bolts protruding from two of its sides. He handed it to Charlene. “Do you know what this is?”
Charlene glanced at the cube and then handed it to Kermin, who inspected it closely. After a moment he said, “It looks like voltage switch, but what is this . . . this white box?”
“This is the world’s first organic semiconductor bistable switch. Made of polyacetylenes, or melanin—the pigments in our skin,” said Leif. He took the switch back from Kermin. “The human body is really a wet-tissued machine. It runs on electricity. We’ve been studying the organic cir
cuitry of the human body for some time, particularly the chemical properties of melanin as a semiconductor. It’s such a beauty of a substance. It’s not just in the skin—we have melanin in the brain, in the substantia nigra. You find this in the basal ganglia—it’s the focal site of learning, reward, addiction, eye movement. But of course, melanin’s most visible role is in the dermis, where it performs some of its most remarkable functions, interacting with the environment around us. We’re basically covered in a thin coat of ‘light radios’ that react to UV radiation waves and convert these waves into different energies.”
Kermin was sitting very still. Charlene felt compelled to reach out and hold her husband’s hand. She felt suddenly close to him. As if the two of them were confronting the world together for the first time.
“So what does this mean for Radar?” she said.
“We’ve been doing some research of our own here. We were investigating how we might turn a human being into a puppet. To rewire the body so that it is completely controlled by another. You can imagine the theatrical and philosophical fallout from such a discovery. We were deathly excited about the idea, but it never quite panned out. At least not yet. But during the course of our electrochemical experimentation, we did stumble upon several accidental discoveries. We found that with certain electromagnetic adjustments, we’re actually able to tune the dial of our melanin light radios—I could turn you into a shortwave radio, for instance, or a telephone, or a television—and we’ve done this with a couple of our own people. We’re pale-skinned, so it’s a little more difficult, but Thorgen, one of the puppeteers, was playing Shostakovich for two days straight—except only he could hear it, and it nearly drove him nuts. At first we couldn’t figure out how to turn it off, but we’ve learned more with each experiment. We keep getting better at this.”
“His skin was playing music?”
“In a manner of speaking,” he said. “His dermis was translating radio waves from a station in Murmansk into pulses that resonated throughout his endoskeleton. His body had become a radio, with receiver, speaker, and no tuning dial, unfortunately. This may come later. But this isn’t even the end of what we can do. What’s even trickier is to actually manipulate the physical composition of these melanosome radios to our liking. We can change their structure. And thus their appearance.”
“Meaning you can change a person’s color?”
“Exactly.”
“So what’s wrong with him, then?”
“You mean what’s wrong with your son? This I cannot tell you. Nothing, as far as I can see. But then, it’s all how you view it. I cannot diagnose. What I can do is manipulate the proteins in his skin and change the molecular composition of his dermis.”
“And you’ve done this before?”
“Only once, but it worked beautifully.”
“Who was it?”
“As a doctor, I’m not at liberty to give you his name, but I will say he was a Negro boy living with the Sami. I’m not sure how he got there. He spoke their language perfectly. And they had heard through the Finnmark grapevine that we were doing these kinds of experiments. And so they came and asked for this. They said it was the child’s choice.”
“How old was he?”
“Nine or ten.”
“And he wanted to change his color?”
“Apparently so. Afterwards, his appearance changed dramatically.”
She considered this. “Why did he do it?”
“I think he was confused. He was the only one who looked like he did. He wanted to be one of them.”
“But he was only a kid!” Charlene exclaimed. “How could he know what he wanted? You shouldn’t just be allowed to change him like that. What if he . . . came to regret it later?”
“I didn’t give counseling in this regard. I was merely fulfilling their request.”
Kermin shifted in his chair. Radar began to sing quietly to himself, touching his fingers together: “Halfway oop or down stairs, halfway oop or down stairs . . .”
Charlene looked at her son.
“Is it dangerous?” she asked.
“I don’t want to mislead you. Everything in life is dangerous. But we’re careful men here. I wouldn’t expose your child to undue harm. For this I give you my word.”
“You electrocute him?”
“It’s more like a reverse electrocution. A negative electromagnetic pulse. We call it electro-enveloping. We would uncharge his subcutaneous layer—specifically his melanosomal proteins—using very precise bilateral voltage switches. We couldn’t guarantee final coloring, but”—he leaned back, eyeing them—“we could get it close to his parents. If that’s what you want.”
Charlene held up her hands. “Well, to tell you the truth, we hadn’t even gotten that far. We haven’t even discussed it at all.”
Leif nodded. “Of course, of course. If it helps to think in these terms: we would be merely correcting a glitch in the system.”
Without warning, Kermin stood up, overturning his chair. Radar stopped and stared at his father.
“We don’t want,” he said. “Thank you, doctor, but we are saying no. To all of this. To everything: thank you, no. Come on, Charlene. We are going.”
“Kermin!” said Charlene, standing with him. “The man is just trying to—”
“This man is crazy,” Kermin hissed. “Jebeno lud. I work with electricity all my life and this man has no idea what he talks about. You cannot uncharge this thing. He will kill him. Do you understand? He will kill him. Dead. On je manijak.”
Kermin picked up his son, who was looking worriedly back and forth between mother and father, sensing the bloom of anger. The knots in their voices.
“Kerm—”
“We are gone,” said Kermin, and he walked out the door with Radar in his arms. They heard Radar’s quiet cry before the door swung closed.
“I’m so sorry,” said Charlene. “We didn’t really talk this through.”
“Please, please,” Leif said, holding out his hand. “He’s mad. Okay, no problem. Maybe I came on too strong. In Norwegian we have qualifiers, and I don’t know how to translate these into English. Sometimes I get carried away. But believe me, I understand the gravity of this decision. I don’t take it lightly, at all. Just keep in mind this is a valuable offer that I’m putting on the table. Think it over. Nothing has to be decided now. You’ve come such a long way. Relax. Enjoy the famous Finnmark air. There’s no pressure to do anything right now. You are my guests. My very special guests.”
• • •
A CABIN HAD BEEN arranged for their arrival. Radar played with a miniature troll he had found on the coffee table and sang quietly to himself.
“Billy clop gruff, trip trop goat come knockin’. Knock it up my bridge.”
Charlene walked slowly around the room, running her fingertips across all the old wooden surfaces. She washed her hands and face. Kermin was busy repacking their things.
“I cannot believe it,” he was saying. “What ever happened to Europe? Drkadžije! And how do these people make a living? Where does money come from? Kakvi ludaci jebo te!”
She came back into the room and ran her hand through her hair.
“Kermin,” she said, and she was about to ask why they had come all this way just to do nothing, but before she could even begin, Kermin looked up at her and said, without hesitation, “No,” and she knew that he was right. She put her wet hands to her face and tried again, halfheartedly, feeling the tears coming—she was not quite sure why; maybe because she knew it was already over. Her hands were cool and wet against her cheeks, and she knew it was madness. Suddenly she saw herself from a great distance, as though she were standing very still on a stage in an empty theater. How had it come to this? Why had she been so intent on coming here? What had she thought would actually happen?
“Trip trop knockin’ on my bridge, Mama!” sai
d Radar, offering up the troll to her.
She took the troll and turned it over in her hands. “So what do we do?” she asked quietly.
“What do we do?” said Kermin. “What we’re always doing. We go home. We live our lives like people.”
“Okay,” she said. “Yes.” Breathing. “I should’ve told you. There was a telegram . . .”
“Telly-gram,” Radar cried. “Machine say ‘Hello how are you?’”
“Don’t worry,” said Kermin. “We go home. We forget this.”
“Okay,” she said. “But we can’t just leave, Kerm. The plane is tomorrow. You can’t just wait by the door the whole evening with your suitcase. Be gracious. The man just wanted to help us.”
“The man does not say what he really wants.”
“Just be nice. For tonight, and then tomorrow we can leave. We don’t have to do anything. It’s a vacation, that’s all. Think of it like that. They paid for it. We’re on vacation.”
He stood still. “For you,” he said finally. “And then we go.”
“And then we go,” she agreed.
They embraced. It had been a long time since they had hugged like this. Radar came over and grabbed their legs. Charlene smelled the beginnings of her husband’s beard, the quiet and familiar symphony of waxen musk lingering in the neglected crinkles behind his ears. She had forgotten all this. Routine had a way of erasing intimacy’s quiet particulars.
8
The evening came, though the sun showed no intention of setting. Leif, now dressed in a crisp white button-down with yellow trousers and plush leather slippers, served them a delicious dinner of salted herring, a rutabaga-and-carrot puree called kålrabistappe, lamb sausage, and a small piece of whale meat, which Charlene tried but could not stomach.
“I’m sorry the others couldn’t join us,” said Leif. “We’re a bit swamped with all of the preparations.”
“What’re you preparing for?” Charlene asked.
“Probably a great disaster.” He laughed. “Would you like to try some aquavit? We make it here.”