The Looking-Glass Sisters

by Gøhril Gabrielsen

  I want to go down again, to my room and bed and all my books. I want to go down and live to the rhythm of morning, afternoon and evening. Is it day or night? The day cycle has ended, summer is at its most intense, I can’t sleep and I’m not completely awake either. The sun, this burning light, everything has become so white – it must be due to the height, I have probably never been closer to the sky. I am constantly blinded, can hardly see, everything in this room has a reflection so penetratingly white that I have to screw up my eyes or keep them completely shut.

  It tires me out so much. If only I had a pair of sunglasses.

  ‘Rgna!’

  ‘Rgna!’ I try again. ‘Iv gt t hve sm snglasss!’

  The dryness in my mouth glues the words together until they’re almost unrecognizable. I haven’t drunk anything for several days. Or is it weeks? Under this burning sky, completely outside time, it could just as well be a question of months, if not years, orbiting in an insane thirst around the sun. Ragna must come immediately with thirst-quenching water – if not, it will be impossible to bring me back to life. For I am already a dried-out country lying here. I am earth so dry that I have cracks several metres down into the abyss. At the bottom, in the depths down there, I continue to trickle – a thin, seeping stream that slowly twists along its bed, waiting for rain, for floods, for the balm of Ragna’s care.

  But time is short. Sand blows in across the plains, fills cavities, drifts into the cracks. Only the tongue and palate are still working in this godforsaken body, and they are both in the process of swelling up into the sky.

  ‘Cm, Rgna! Hlp. M so thrsty!’

  How can she suddenly avoid all contact, bound as she is by her obligation as a sister to take care of me? The sudden idleness after her lifelong, daily activity must, if nothing else, have given rise to a feeling of unrest, or gnawing thoughts about how I am getting on now. What does she do with her time? Does she feel a twinge in the morning around the time for my morning care? Does she wake up at night around the time I used to call out for help?

  Johan has sabotaged our sisterly pact, he’s the one who’s lured her into thinking new thoughts, making choices that distance her from her true work. What does he really want, that greedy man-child? For her to wash and dry his bottom, the same as she did previously for me?

  *

  This room, it seems impossible to think that anyone can have lived here. The house was built before Ragna was born, but everything seems to be worn out and dilapidated. The paint on the floorboards has been worn away in a straight line from the bed to the door, probably by someone over a period of years. The curtains, faded and threadbare, flutter by the draughty window, while on the walls the sharp outlines of frames suggest that pictures once hung there. The chair, the bedside table and the chest of drawers wobble on unstable legs, the water has been turned off at the mains and the washstand is cracked. I can’t understand it; someone must have lived and worked in this room, but not Ragna or me, and it can’t have been Mum and Dad either.

  There is no reason to doubt my location, where I actually find myself, for right beneath the window the old birch tree stands swaying. I could grasp the branches if I wanted to, and see, when I stretch towards the glass, how the rosebay willowherb grows in great clusters as before, and how the open plains stretch out in their familiar way for miles and miles around. Everything is as usual – both the view and the room, just dilapidated, and seen from high up. And that makes me feel really giddy.

  Time is spent in bed, as before, except that the mattress here is hard and resists when my body presses against it. I miss sinking into soft pillows, and I miss my daydreaming; I pass nearly all my time lying with my eyes half-closed, peering, turning a bit every now and again, and without all that many thoughts in my head. I know that I ought to be up training, get hold of my crutches, take the few steps over to the door, perhaps as far as out into the attic room and over to the stairs. I was eager to begin with, but then I was still full of hope of an imminent reunion with my former life on the ground floor.

  I have also raged and created havoc around me; occasionally I scream horribly and bang my crutches against the furniture and the wall. Ragna and Johan then react with stillness, whispers, and the pent-up laughter stops completely. But the stillness never lasts for all that long, they’re too happy in their newly won freedom. I can see them in my mind’s eye, sitting at the kitchen table when it happens; looking at each other and praying silently that they can last out: sooner or later these terrible attacks of rage of mine must come to an end. If not, surely they would have come up here, seen how I was doing, blessed me with some water and some care?

  No, nothing’s as it should be. This violent shifting between surges of strength and exhaustion, I don’t understand it; sometimes I am consumed by a fuming rage, and this despite my insane thirst and my physical state. The surges of strength come suddenly, I’ve no idea from where, but it’s probably natural they start to grow in intensity every time I think of what’s happened – that I’ve been dumped and forgotten by both of them. It starts as a slight tingling sensation, a touch of resentment; perhaps I feel the longing for Ragna’s hands. But the surges increase under the heavy weight of everything that has created my screwed-up life. And they grow even stronger and more violent when I think of what Johan has set in motion.

  At some point or other it’s as if I lose all control, and it’s difficult to say if the surges come from inside or outside me. Everything is seen from the outside, I am reduced to an observing eye, I stare at myself and my actions, matter-of-factly, neutrally, from a place in the corner here. I see myself arch my back, I see my arms, the muscles quiveringly taut, and then I see myself thrust forward with my feet, lift my body with my lower legs, my thighs, hold myself upright on powerful legs. And in this way I stand in bed, like a mountain, and roar.

  Yet what surprises me most is not the surges of strength or the lower body that in an instant starts to function. No, it’s what happens the following morning or night, or perhaps just a few hours later (what do I know about the cycle of day and night in this eternally burning light?). Twice it’s happened, and on both occasions after an attack: I wake up and discover that the furniture is not in the same condition as before, or rather, the furniture that I smashed, destroyed during the attack, all the discarded things that I pulled out of boxes and suitcases in the attic room outside – they’re gone, every single thing has been removed and tidied away. There’s not a strip of paper to be seen, not a trace of splintered wood, not a scrap of razor-sharp glass shattered into a thousand fragments visible anywhere.

  The last time I lay down on the floor, I even sniffed, smelt, examined things; bored my eye down into every single crack along the length of the floorboards. A grain of dust, a strand of hair, a little dirt here and there, oh yes, but not the trace of the mirror or the washbasin that I had just smashed to pieces. The mirror dust, the millions of small mirror particles, ought to have been winking up at me in the light, glittering in brief flashes and all the colours of the rainbow. But the floor was swept clean of all traces of my outburst. Only the wall where the washbasin and mirror had once hung confirmed what had happened. Yes, that’s right, it’s absolutely true – I stood up and went over to that corner of the room, on my own legs, surely and steadily. And I bashed my crutches against the porcelain and the glass until everything was in ruins around me. The turned-off water taps that now jut out into the room, the marks on the walls from the crutches, there can be no other explanation: it’s true that the washstand and the mirror have been here, and it’s equally true that every little piece of them has gone.

  True?

  If I sucked the marrow from my bones and spat it out, the very core of my innermost being, then perhaps completely different truths would be revealed, come gleamingly to light. It is all fantasy, a product of my endless life in bed, lost in aimless daydreaming as I always am. Daydreams with night in them and with nameless moons and planets as homes for a mind that’s gone astr
ay.

  But I fear the worst, that which is worse: that I am dying and approaching final annihilation, yes, that I’m in the middle of an apocalypse, in its shining, swelling nucleus.

  I ought to be prepared. I’ve always been aware of the fact that sooner or later it will happen. I am, in spite of everything, someone who has lived at the furthest extremities of life, and I experience these extremities daily, inside the walls of this house. The lopsidedness of the chair, the dull sheen of the glass, the fatigue in everything and everyone, I have constantly observed the frailty, visible proof of the fact that nothing ultimately endures in the struggle against the forces of destruction. Disintegration, cessation – I’ve lived with the threat every single day: death quivering in a cup, in a step, in a single action, in the slightest movement. The things around me and I have realized that death can come at any moment, just a wrong step, a small slip, and the cup is broken and I am gone. It’s got nothing to do with my helplessness, my dependence on crutches, but is simply due to the unpredictability of death.

  *

  So perhaps things have come to this: I am perhaps close to annihilation, while they sit downstairs enjoying their coffee. It’s unbearable, for Johan is sure to be squirming in pleasure on the chair where I ought to have been sitting, and munching away at cakes I ought to have been eating. And Ragna, who ought to have been busy nursing and caring, is probably sitting there right at this moment, flaunting herself with her blouse open and her breasts bared. It is shameful how they are enjoying good food and each other while I’m left lying abandoned and unsure whether I am alive or dead. And just to make it quite clear once more, I still do not want to be among the dead.

  So what else is left to me other than to rage: bang on the floor with my crutches, shout out their names, yell the filthiest words I know, and finally smash the chair and bedside table. But no matter how much racket I make, no matter how much I hammer and wreck the place, it will only ever be a faint clinking compared to the noise of the rage that thunders deep down within me. And once again I end up just as uncomprehending, confused at what later happens: the scraps of wood that made up the bedside table are gone, as are the remains of the chair – there’s not a splinter left. So now the room is empty and completely clean, and all that’s left is me and the bed. But of course we are also inseparable, forever bound to each other.

  *

  I seep and trickle, murmur like a tiny stream at the bottom of life. I get the idea of undressing, folding my clothes neatly, placing them on the pillow, going out into the small streak of water, dipping my head into the silvery liquid and quenching my thirst on the very last vestiges of life inside myself.

  Maybe I ought to just stay lying like this, motionless, let the water run into my eyes, nose, fill my mouth, lungs, lie and let my thirst be quenched, and then trickle away, become part of the water, gleaming and transparent: the ultimate confirmation of my invisible life.

  And perhaps, still with my face in the water, I will see two sentences come floating by. That is the final judgement, the punishment for everything I have done in my struggle to become visible to Ragna and Johan. I have to choose between the two, there is no fixed ending, no forgiveness, my existence will continue, depending on the sentence I choose:

  I exist, and do not know it.

  I do not exist, and know it.

  *

  ‘Cm, Rgna! M blddy thrsty!’

  But no, Ragna is not to be budged, she remains downstairs with her resentment and anger. She has consistently ignored my cries, all the racket and my supplications. She wants to have me gone, that’s nothing new, she’s wanted that for ages. The nursing home is one thing, but during the slow progress along my dried-up riverbed, among the remains of my joy in living and urge to live, I have brushed up against this and that: an impression of her here, a memory there, small events that confirm that Ragna already wanted me gone when she was quite small.

  But perhaps it isn’t the case that my sister at long last wants to see me disappear, for maybe I have not been created, incarnated, indeed not even rendered intelligible as an idea in this world. Here, right at the beginning of memories, I am open to the idea that I, this dusty old thought of living, this primeval wish for a life, have not been conceived and born.

  Everything is so confusing, what is it that is actually happening? Is even my own death, this inexorable cessation that has always seemed to me to be a clear, ineluctable truth, to become just as full of uncertainty and speculation as my entire life has been? I can feel that it exhausts me, I am so endlessly tired of never knowing, never completely understanding, of constantly finding myself, no, being forced into an endless series of guesses and assumptions. Maybe there is no forgiveness; after annihilation waits not a final explanation, no reconciling peace, just new enigmas and an infinity of possible answers.

  Does the spell that I tried to put on Johan produce those surges of sudden strength, but in the wrong direction, so the words, the filthy, contemptible words that were meant for him, are actually striking me instead, their sharpness slowly twisting my thoughts and draining my strength?

  *

  The books, the scribblings under the bed in my old room: I would like to have written down what I think and experience, but perhaps writing is precisely what I am doing? A narrative about two seedy sisters and their determined struggle for a life, but also about all of us who have lapsed into laziness and fantasizing, hidden away in a room closer to the sky than the earth?

  Therefore, when I finally let go, loosen my last connection with the secure, the usual and the general, it can of course be explained as the result of my craving for drama, my desire to lie and rewrite and change everything that takes place. For here I come, on a free fall through the Cambrian, Devonian, Jurassic, Cretaceous, tumbling through the primeval sky, primeval time, time before, time when, time after, the time has come; receive me, hold me, I am a poor grizzled one, a newly hatched one, or perhaps nothing.

  ‘Hlp! Rgna! M dsapprng!’

  But it is not Ragna’s hands I can feel, it is the pain from stone and sand, earth and roots pressing against my back and chest. And it is not her voice I hear, reassuringly telling me to pull myself together, but the sound of regular spade-cuts that gradually fall silent. And it is not Ragna who disappears out of the door, angry and furious, it is time wrapping itself around skin and skull, bone and cartilage. And it is not I nestling under the duvet, it is I lying abandoned in a mire of oblivion, just next to the birch tree, right outside my old window. And it is not I fishing a book up from under the bed and placing a pen between my fingers. It is I who have no more to write, no more book to fill, not a margin, not a page to compose. Everything has been written, my story is complete, it disappears. And in a moment I will be gone.

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