Requiem

by Geir Tangen

  The ex—or “the witch,” as Viljar liked to call her—had insisted that he take his share of responsibility from day one. In the past he could drop off his son on Sunday afternoons, but now when Alexander had turned sixteen, he showed up whenever he wanted to. His mother said it was a natural development, and Viljar didn’t care to protest, even if it made his life even more of a mess.

  The cigarette breathed its last sigh and fell to the ground as Viljar slowly made his way back to the office. A sour odor of tobacco smoke trailed behind him down the corridors. A couple of nonsmokers wrinkled their noses demonstratively as he passed. Viljar couldn’t have cared less. He dampened the worst smoker’s breath with another stick of nicotine gum when he saw that Øveraas was standing ready by his cubicle yet again.

  “If I docked your pay for those fucking breaks you take every day, your monthly salary would be pitiful, Gudmundsson.” The editor was standing with his hands firmly planted in his spare tire.

  “And if you compared the number of words I contribute to the newspaper to what the other reporters produce, you’d see that I should have a pay raise. A story always has several sides, Øveraas. You ought to know that, since you call yourself an editor.”

  The corpulent editor-in-chief’s face again turned noticeably redder. “Damn it, it’s not about length, Gudmundsson.”

  “No, like I said … You ought to know that.”

  Viljar laughed and pushed his way past the editor, who now showed all signs of losing control. Fortunately he was also speechless. Øveraas turned on his heels, kicked at a potted plant, and left the field before war broke out.

  If Viljar had had an office door, he would have slammed it behind him. Instead he put on his headset. He looked with dismay at the dreariness outside the windows. For hour after hour, he could sit and stare at the drops trickling down the panes. In the steam on the glass, the rain formed an undulating latticework. People huddled up under the rain-heavy sky by the 7-Eleven on the other side of Karmsundsgata before they ran toward waiting cars.

  He pulled an old T-shirt from the drawer and dried his hair to keep drops of water from dripping down on the keyboard. Then he tossed the T-shirt under the desk. He updated his email in-box and noted in the corner of his eye that it was full of incoming messages. He started deleting them. Mostly these were ads and meaningless notices from management.

  Viljar had to concentrate to avoid deleting any important email. Finally he had three messages left. An appointment from the Helse Fonna clinic, one from the betting pool at work, and an email from a man whose name he didn’t recognize. Probably a reader who wanted to point out something that was wrong or omitted in one of his articles. He sighed. That was the worst thing about this job. Constant comments from readers who didn’t seem to have anything to do other than write complaints. Often the same readers again and again. He opened the email.

  Viljar felt the pain in his chest after a few seconds. Noticed that it was getting harder to breathe. The room swayed. Shooting pains in his face made him gasp. He got up from his chair and started wandering aimlessly around the office area. Breathed deeply in and out as he’d been taught by the psychologist. Tried to think about something else. Right now that was difficult. Viljar nodded with effort at a colleague before he loosened an imaginary tie and turned back to the desk and the computer screen. He stared at the text. The letters flowed together as a drop of salty sweat ran down into his eye. He wiped it away and read the email again.

  Attn.: Viljar Gudmundsson

  I am writing to you because I know that you are an honorable man. A man who will condemn what I am in the process of doing, but at the same time is capable of understanding my indignation and frustration over a legal system that no longer functions.

  We have laws that are supposed to protect us against people who take what they want, and not an unkind word shall be said about those who admit their guilt and take their just punishment. It is the others I want to put the spotlight on. Those who even in the hour of judgment avoid punishment and get away. They are the hyenas of society. Cowardly, greedy, and evasive. They deserve the punishment I shall give them. I will be punished myself for my actions. This I will take with head held high when the time comes. Until that happens, people will die by my hand. Guilty people who each in their own way avoided their rightful punishment.

  In today’s society, fewer and fewer people think of anyone but themselves. The sense of solidarity is dead. The spirit of collective work is gone. Loyalty to employers is a foreign word. People steal from the hand that feeds them.

  One of these greedy people is a woman. She is convicted of gross embezzlement and disloyalty in service. She has no previous record, but this has not been deemed an extenuating circumstance. The punishment will be effectuated tomorrow, Tuesday the 14th of October.

  10/13/2014

  Stein Åmli

  UL7-1

  Viljar stuffed a fresh portion of snus under his lip. Felt the prickling in his fingers and toes. Again he took a deep breath before slowly letting it out again. The familiar darkness settled like a lid around the gray matter of his brain. Would he have to relate to this too? The letters radiated from the computer screen. Aversion radiated from Viljar. For a moment he considered deleting the whole message. Use the defense mechanism he knew best. “Avoidance syndrome,” the psychologist called it. “The majority of problems we worry about are completely unfounded,” she had tried to convince him. He felt reasonably certain that this particular email did not belong in that category. A single click, and the problem would be out of his hands. No. It isn’t like that.

  Deep down he had no faith that this was a genuine threatening letter. No one writes such things. Nonetheless, there was something in the email that made him feel anxious. He dried his clammy hands on his pant legs. The email was as if lifted out of a bad crime novel. The classic “judge” who takes the law into his own hands, and who defends his actions to a journalist. A worn-out cliché that would have made any editor refuse the manuscript before the end of the first chapter.

  The “pronouncement of judgment” had the marks of being jotted down in five minutes without particular inspiration. Maybe that was why the hairs on his neck stood up? It was unimportant that it should appear like a court document. It was as if the email was written because it had to be, not because the author had a need to express himself. In many ways this frightened Viljar far more than an indignant threatening letter would have.

  He quickly searched on the name “Stein Åmli.” Of course it produced little or nothing. Various offers for purchase of stone, crushed rock, and gravel in the town of Åmli was the closest he got to a hit. Fictional name.

  He knew that if he went to Øveraas with the email, the dollar signs in the editor’s eyes would roll like a one-armed bandit on the Danish ferry. His ring finger lingered one last time on the Delete key in the right corner of the keyboard before he pulled his hand away. He needed to hear what Ranveig thought about this pile of shit. He climbed out of his chair with a hunched back that invited neither company nor small talk. He noticed that people kept their distance.

  * * *

  Ranveig Børve saw the black look in Viljar’s eyes several seconds before he was standing beside her. It was always that way with Viljar. He kept his distance on good days, and came sneaking up on her on bad ones. Once when she was at the food festival in Stavanger, she bought a T-shirt for him that said THERE’S ALWAYS SOMETHING. He wore it often at work, and obviously hadn’t caught on to the sarcasm.

  It wasn’t easy to be fond of Viljar, but Ranveig was. She was ten years younger than he. He was her mentor when she started as a reporter at the newspaper. Back then he was passionately engaged with a gleam in his eye and a master at creating news where others saw only short articles. Now it was the other way around.

  Something had happened. After a long sick leave four years ago, he had come back a shadow of himself.

  No one really knew what had taken the spark of life out of the Icelander
, but the rumor mill at the media house was an insatiable troll.

  Ranveig put on a smile under her long, blond bangs and twirled around on the office chair. “Hi, Viljar. Finished with that DPS thing that made Øveraas delirious that you hadn’t done?”

  Viljar plopped down in the chair that belonged to the cubicle next to hers. He waved away the question, set the paper he had with him on her desk, and tapped it with his index finger. “What do you make of this? It landed in my in-box a few minutes ago.”

  Ranveig drew her bangs behind her ear with her index finger and guided the pen over the sheet of paper while she read. Several times she stopped and looked inquiringly at Viljar, but he stopped her from saying anything, and she kept reading.

  “This is bullshit,” she said. “This is some joker who wants us to completely lose our heads, and bring out the extra bold font we used during the TERRA case.”

  Viljar seemed relieved, but he still had a panicked look.

  “You’re not taking this seriously, are you, Viljar?”

  “No, of course not, but I just can’t give it to Øveraas. He’ll get a little horny and stagger around with a hard-on the rest of the day if he sees that email.”

  Ranveig laughed out loud and leaned over toward Viljar. “Yes, like that time Arsene Wenger came to town to buy Håvard Nordtveit for Arsenal,” she whispered, laughing like a naughty child.

  Viljar nodded and smiled. He picked up the paper and looked inquiringly up at Ranveig. “Seriously … What do I do with this?”

  Ranveig studied the pen in her hand as if it held all the answers. “Email a copy to the police, and forget about it. Nothing will happen, and if it does, strictly speaking it’s a police matter, isn’t it?”

  “Obviously. You’re completely right.”

  He leaned over and gave her a quick hug. Ranveig was completely dumbfounded, and responded to the squeeze with a fumbling gesture.

  “Nice. Let’s do that then,” she said, conjuring away the embarrassed mood between them with a forced smile.

  Ranveig didn’t want to say it, but there were many things that didn’t add up with that email. This was Haugesund, not a bad episode of Criminal Minds. She hoped her gut feeling was wrong, and that this was the last they heard from Stein Åmli.

  Requiem: Introitus

  I look into her eyes. Dark green. Sparkling. A flirtatious twinkle when she sees it’s me. Her mouth forms an impudent little smile. She doesn’t hesitate, pulls off my coat and drops it on the old linoleum floor from the early seventies. The floor is in keeping with the unmodern, poorly maintained apartment. Rita Lothe is considerably livelier in bed than she is in interior design, you might say.

  As she tears garment after garment off us with practiced movements, I look around the apartment. I notice details. An old, well-stocked liquor cabinet in yellowed pine beside the corner sofa. A laptop computer totters on the armrest of a worn black leather armchair. I don’t yet know if the computer is password-protected. I spy about for her cell phone. It’s crucial that it turn up in the course of the night. Her breathing has shifted gear. She’s horny. I let her keep fumbling with her own buttons while I study the door to the balcony and the area outside. Big enough, I determine as she sighs contentedly and closes her lips around my dick.

  My head is aching intensely as we’re catching our breath twenty minutes later. I massage the tender area behind my left ear, and realize that exertions like this make the pain worse. It feels like tiny shudders along the nerve pathways, like rhythmic jolts, and I get a strange metallic taste in my mouth.

  I know what awaits me. I’ve known it a long time. Glioblastoma multiforme … Sounds beautiful, doesn’t it? Almost like a kind of tropical flower from a botany text.

  Some will no doubt maintain that death is beautiful. In ancient Greece, Death was depicted as a handsome and attractive boy, and on gravestones, he was depicted as a gentle and good divine guardian with downturned torch and a wreath in his hand. I can refute all the beauty. Death is lonely, dark, and terrible. Sometimes painful too. As with me. Glioblastoma multiforme, or malignant brain tumor if you wish, is not recommended if you’re someone who takes three Tylenol at the first hint of a hangover.

  Every single waking hour of the day it screams for my attention from its source in the area behind my left ear. I know it’s there, and what it’s up to. I still have time. Several weeks, perhaps even months, if fate wishes it.

  Rita comes out of the bathroom. Freshly showered and decked out. What’s the point? A hint of jasmine brushes past my nostrils. She sits down beside me. Raises the glass of red wine and drinks greedily. I empty my glass in a flowerpot every time she leaves the room on some little errand or has her attention directed somewhere else.

  I fetch my backpack from the hallway. Open it and take out a bottle of red wine I brought along. She twitters contentedly from the couch. I open it, and set the bottle beside her glass. It will barely have time to breathe before it’s empty. I take out a glass and pour myself a cognac from the liquor cabinet. Renault Carte Noire—VSOP. Her taste buds must have died long ago, I think as I let the golden-brown fluid rotate in my mouth. It tastes cloying and dead. In that respect, suitable for the setting.

  Benzodiazepines are found in many forms, several of which are easily soluble in water or other liquids. The drawback is that most of them produce a bitter aftertaste that is difficult to conceal. In a bottle of red wine, four sleeping pills will give the wine a slightly unfortunate aftertaste. Worth noting if someone hasn’t already had so much to drink that anything at all slides down. Rita does not show the slightest sign of displeasure as she drinks the way she usually does. Steadily bigger gulps and more frequent refills. I feel calmness spreading in my body. This is the only awkward note in the score. The bitter aftertaste. Now it’s only a matter of waiting.

  Her gaze is blurred now. She snuffles, yawns, and talks nonsense. The plan is a masterpiece. My Requiem aeternam. The composition is neatly categorized in six rows at home on the desk. Six names. Six death sentences. Six movements.

  Everything must be exactly as it is described. This is a magic mirror. One step to the side, and the illusion disappears. A forgotten trifle is enough for the table to turn.

  I look up at the dim light from the chandelier. The corners in Rita’s apartment have crept into semidarkness. An image of my life. I was in the room, but the light never reached me. A life that almost became something great. I’ve decided to step out of the shadows now. The thought thrills me. That everyone will get to see. The completion of the masterwork, like a final movement in one of Mahler’s symphonies.

  I am the Maestro. I look at my hands. They are not shaking.

  Rita is in the middle of her Confutatis maledictis, without even knowing it. It amuses me that she is lying less than an arm’s length away from me with her mouth in a blissful grin. She does not suspect that the hourglass is about to run out.

  In a little flash of unvarnished self-insight, I see myself as I really am. The stroke of a crow’s wing. I must believe in this. I am the masterpiece itself. A coincidence made it so. I had a revelation. A chance to compose my own requiem.

  I carefully close the eyes of the slumbering sinner beside me and spray a bandage with crystal clear fluid from a bottle on the table. I place the rag around her nose and mouth. She whimpers and is about to wake up. I count down the seconds, and little by little she falls asleep. All pain disappears. I am pure.

  Pain is weakness leaving the body, I think contentedly, and close the final door to the life I once lived.

  Fjellvegen, Haugesund

  Tuesday morning, October 14, 2014

  Low-lying fog rolled in over the town on the strait of Karmsund. Fall was in the air. Sea fog, a damp, clammy blanket that slowly squeezes the life force out of you. As the 8:20 flight from Oslo cut through the cloud cover over the apartment buildings, the passengers could barely glimpse the top floors, and something blinking blue and red on the ground.

  “Tell me, Lotte, w
hy is it necessary to send out multiple police officers every time some depressed idiot takes the shortcut out of their problems?”

  Chief Inspector Lotte Skeisvoll with the Haugesund Police Department looked dumbfounded at the newly minted constable sitting beside her in the car. The two colleagues were en route from the police station by Smedasundet. A patrol had called for assistance to the high-rises on Fjellvegen.

  Christian Hauge was clinging to the steering wheel. The way he drove did not correspond with his attitude toward the mission. Full sirens and blinking blue lights through the roundabouts by Haugesund News. A small black e-Golf stopped in terror, halfway up on the median, after they passed. Lotte concealed a smile.

  The response concerned a suspicious death. Although perhaps it wasn’t very suspicious. A woman had in all likelihood jumped from the balcony of one of the apartments and ended her life on the asphalt strip between the building and the lawn, but a death was always counted as suspicious until it could be concluded that it was either from natural causes or a suicide.

  The young man eased up on his driving a little when they had passed Spannavegen and the traffic was lighter. Lotte cocked her head in irritation and straightened the police radio in the holster on the dashboard. It was not in line with the car stereo alongside, and such details bothered her.

  “Is it really necessary to send more than one patrol?” The driver glanced quickly at her before turning his eyes back to the road again.

  “And if it turns out that the victim hasn’t done this on her own?”

  “Well, then the officers in the patrol car can call in the rest of the team from the station. We could save a lot of money that way.”

  “Exactly,” she answered.

  That one word was dripping with sarcasm. Lotte went through the routine description in her mind once more instead. Quickly ran through all the details she had to recall when she arrived at the grayish white colossi that had stood watch over the City of Herring since the dedication in 1969. A historic marker of a time when every self-respecting city built high-rise apartment blocks.