As it turned out, Father needed very little explanation; Mother and he had been updated a great deal more than I’d imagined. Already during that first phone call to my parents, Havstein had explained what kind of place this was, and how it might be better for me to stay for a while. Which was why they hadn’t called. But Havstein hadn’t stopped there, he’d filled them in during the autumn and the spring, calling once a month or thereabouts, telling them how things were with me. Which was why they hadn’t pestered me.
Now Father’s visit took the shape of a parents’ evening.
We sat out on the rocks overlooking the harbor, Havstein, Father, and I.
We discussed things.
Cleaned out the engine, you might say.
“Do you feel we’ve gone behind your back, Mattias? By not telling you I’ve talked with your parents so much?” Havstein asked.
“No, not really,” I answered. “Maybe it was a bit extreme.”
“I didn’t want you to have to think about it,” said Havstein.
“Did you ask Father to come over?”
“No,” interjected Father, and smiled proudly. “That was my idea.”
“It was a good one.”
Havstein flicked through his imaginary psychiatry textbook and came up with a suggestion.
“Maybe you two would like to be alone for a little while?”
“Thank you,” said Father, taking Havstein’s hand and giving it a long, firm shake.
“Quality time,” I said.
So we sat there. Father and son, on the grass overlooking the harbor, with a view as far as the North or South Pole for anybody capable of looking over the globe and beyond the horizon, hadn’t thought we’d ever sit like this, here, that I’d have this feeling of being taken care of by my father again.
“Do you want to talk about Sofia?” he said.
“Sofia?”
“She’s in the hospital, I understand. An accident?”
“That’s right. She could die at any time. We’d better sit still.”
“What?”
“The butterfly effect,” I said. “The beat of a butterfly’s wings can change the weather.”
“You’re in love with that girl, aren’t you? With Sofia?”
“You don’t need to do this, Father. I’m not fourteen, you know.”
“No, that’s true. That’s true. You’re right. My mistake.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said:
“What really happened to you, Mattias?”
It was funny to hear him say it like that. What had happened to me. It made me uneasy. My heart beat harder in my chest, and I was frightened he might notice.
“Did you know the sea level is constantly rising? By a centimeter each year. It’s true. And the land only rises an average of four millimeters a year. The figures don’t balance. Don’t you think that’s scary?”
“Mattias.”
“And Iceland lies directly over two continental plates. Which is why there’s so much volcanic activity there. The country could be ripped in two at any moment. Don’t you ever think about that?”
“Mattias, what’s happened to you? Why are you talking like this?”
And then I said it:
“I think I just fell apart a little.”
“Because of Helle?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Not just that. It was everything put together, I think. So much happened. Karsten had to give up the nursery, then Helle left, and Jørn got me over here, tried to get me involved with the band, one way or another. By the way, did you know more and more nursing homes have started to buy their flowers from supermarkets? Well, they have. That’s not exactly going the right way.” I looked at Father, before adding: “I was about to be discovered again, can you understand that? Just when I’d managed to disappear. But I’m better now. Thanks for asking.”
Father seemed troubled. He put a hand behind his head, massaged his neck and sighed.
“Mattias, it’s impossible not to leave tracks behind you. There’ll always be somebody to see you. Always somebody that loves you. Almost always. That’s just how things are.”
“It’s not that. It’s not that I don’t want to leave tracks, I just don’t want them to be visible to the whole world. I don’t need to leave my handprint in the cement. I don’t need to be interviewed about what I do. Is that such a problem? Not needing to be seen? We don’t all want to be in the front row. Somebody has to choose to be number two.”
“But why does it have to be you?”
“Because the world doesn’t go around in any other way.”
He shook his head, took my hand.
“Have you heard of Olga Omelchenko?” I asked, knowing he hadn’t. “She was field doctor for the 37th Guard Division in the Soviet Union, she saved a life in 1943. She’d survived one of the biggest battles that year, and when the bombardment eventually stopped, she crawled over to a soldier who lay close by, his arm was a complete mess, and she knew she had to amputate if he was going to live. But she had no anesthetic. She had no knife, no scissors, nothing.” I paused briefly. “So she used her teeth, gnawed through the flesh and bandaged his arm, and he lived into old age.”
“Mattias!”
“It’s true.” And I reeled off all the other names I remembered, the facts I’d been collecting since I was a child, stories about Emmanuel Bove and Nino Rota, about Maria Oktiabrskaia whose husband was killed at the front, who used all her savings to buy a T-34 tank and went to join the war against Germany, age thirty-eight, about Tenzing Norgay, the sherpa who reached the top of Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953, but whom almost nobody remembered, I told him about Jack Purvis, the eccentric American jazz musician who traveled to Europe with his band but deserted them on the first night, climbed over the roof of a Paris hotel in his stocking feet, later he played with the great Coleman Hawkins and Higginbotham, then went to California and worked as a chef, then wrote the music for a one-hundred-ten piece orchestra for Warner Bros. before going back to playing in small clubs in New York, he vanished again, only to pop up in the US Army, later he sat in prison for armed robbery in El Paso and broadcasted concerts from inside. He failed to turn up to meet his parole officer after his release, was jailed again, and when he eventually got out again, it was 1946 and the war was over. It’s less clear what happened next, some said he began work as a commercial pilot, and others thought they’d seen a man who looked like him sitting in the garden of the king’s palace in Honolulu, playing Flight of the Bumble Bee, alternating between trombone and trumpet. He was also observed in Baltimore working as a carpenter, as a cook on an international ship, he lived under numerous aliases, always avoided being connected to his name, didn’t want to be recognized, got a job as a radio repairman in San Francisco, and so I went on, an encyclopedia, an ancient scroll flowing with forgotten biographies, and the more I talked, the more I remembered, they tumbled out of my mouth, like pearls on a string, all the lives you forgot, but that somehow touched you, I talked about how Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins decided they shouldn’t have their names on the insignia for Apollo 11, because their mission was greater than any one man, I talked about the athletes that came second to Carl Lewis when he won four gold medals in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Steve Ballmer, the man who worked under Bill Gates at Microsoft, and about President Paul von Hindenburg, who, weary of everything, relinquished the struggle to hold back the pressure, resigned, and gave a much younger upstart the place he screamed for, named him Chancellor, and disappeared himself, and Adolf Hitler, forty-two years younger, took the power in 1933.
“But why do you always have to give up,” said Father, “pass up all your chances? Can’t you just accept that people want to spend time with you? That you make people around you happy? Is it that dangerous to have a little focus on you? You don’t have to be world famous because of that. I just can’t understand why you have to take all the world’s sins on your shoulders and go into hiding from the world, and
work in some kind of penal colony.”
“You don’t understand. There are no chances to miss,” I said. “I haven’t lost out on anything, I haven’t given anything up. Think of the people that collect the garbage outside your house, the train driver who takes you where you want to go, the projectionist who stands in the control room and makes sure everything’s set when you and Mother go to the movies. The ambulance driver. The woman who cleans your hotel room after you’ve left. You don’t see them. You don’t know them. But you appreciate them doing their jobs, don’t you? That they take care of you? What if that’s all I want to do? Take care of someone. I just want to do something right.”
“Yes, of course—”
“What I do is important, isn’t it?”
“Yes—”
“I contribute to the gross national product too, don’t I? I do just as important a job as most people. It’s just that I don’t want there to be so much fuss because of it. I just want to be left in peace. Haven’t you ever liked the thought that you were one of thousands of cogs in some massive machine, that your contribution was worthwhile even though nobody saw it?”
“But you don’t work for a Japanese production company. You’re not a machine, Mattias.”
“No. I’m not. Do you know what I’m most afraid of?”
“What?”
“That I’ll be useless. The movie of the week on a defunct TV channel. That I’ll only be in the way and get nothing done. That terrifies me,” I whispered.
I could see I’d upset Father, he sat closer, put an arm around my shoulder. “You’ll never be useless,” he said, giving weight to every word. “You are the most meaningful thing I have. You are all that is good in my life. You, and Mother. But you should just relax a bit. Things will work themselves out, you just need to take it easy, at first.”
And I believed him.
“It’s just that this has gone on far too long now,” he continued. “You’ve become more and more closed off in the last few years, didn’t you notice? In the end it wasn’t even possible to live with you. And even now you can’t see that there are people desperate to be with you. Sofia, for example. Don’t you see that?”
I said nothing. Kept mum. Zipped my mouth.
“Your cog needs repairing, Mattias, that’s all. You’ve just been ill again, it’s nothing to be scared of, and it’ll all turn out all right in the end, you’re in safe hands, I understand, and—”
“What do you mean ‘again’?” I interrupted. “That I’m ill again?”
And so it came. Father’s big avalanche. And I realize now that I must have known about these things all along, but that they’d simply been erased from my memory as I grew older. They’d been repressed or simply stored away, packed in rough boxes and taped down with brown carpenter’s tape.
Something serious had happened in 1983. I was fourteen, and then one day when Mother and Father returned from work, the door to my room was locked. I refused to come out. They tried everything, but I locked myself further and further into my room. All they heard was the sound of me barricading the door and windows with furniture. I didn’t eat for a week. Crept out of hibernation, out into the bathroom at night, when I knew they were asleep. Somebody came to talk to me, a voice I didn’t recognize, pulled a chair up to my door and talked to me, asked how I felt. I didn’t answer. Not until late into the second day of his sitting there. Finally I gave up. Moved the desk and let him in, it was a doctor that Mother had got hold of. Don’t remember what we talked about, don’t remember what it was. Just remember that I never wanted to come out again.
But I came out. Or, at least, not voluntarily. I screamed. I ranted, but they dragged me out, and I sat in the backseat of the car, huddled up under the window, and we drove through the streets, and I didn’t want to be seen.
1983. Autumn in Stavanger and I only wake up on Tuesdays, don’t know why. Apart from then, I sleep. I sleep through the weeks and when I wake up the sheets are always freshly washed, it smells like soap in the room and there’s never any dust on the windowsill. The room is hot, I want to open the windows and let in the fresh air, but I’m not allowed. I’m informed that it’s aired when I’m out. I don’t know if that’s true. Then I fall asleep again, and my dreams are always the same, but I never remember them. Father comes on alternate days. On the other days I do nothing. Father brings tea in a thermos. He’s never drunk tea before, I don’t know why he’s started now, I’m not even particularly fond of it. But we sit in our chairs, and drink tea and talk about the streets outside. They’re still the same, he says. They’re all waiting for you, they have all the time in the world. I try to picture them, and then Mother comes through the door. Hangs her coat on the coatrack by the wardrobe, sits on the edge of the bed.
“Well?” she says, always the same word, it’s meant as a question and I give the same answer every time.
“I’m okay. Thanks for asking.”
I’m a polite person.
None of us says anything. There are no conversations left to be had. Several times. I look at the clock over the door. It’s going backward, and I think how in backward-land anything might happen, they’re all equally crazy and strange there, all of them. And I am in backwardland. There’s no doubt about that. And it’s raining outside, it’s been raining since I arrived, it’ll reach the window sill soon, it’ll flow between the cracks and lift the beds from the floor, sweep us out and down the hallway, if nobody does anything.
Suddenly I get up, walk to the wardrobe. I take out my jacket, put it on, search for my shoes.
Father: “Mattias, where are you going?”
Me: “I think it’s time to go, isn’t it?”
It’s the same each time they come. That’s just how it is. I want to go home. But it’s too early.
Mother comes over to me, hugs me, takes my jacket off. I sit back in the chair, drink tea.
“Don’t make things more complicated than they already are,” she says.
“Do you think they’re complicated? That’s really not the intention.”
“We’re all victims here, Mattias. This is difficult for everyone.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
I look out of the window. The snow is heavy on the trees, a branch gives way, snow gushes down the trunk.
“Look,” I say. “The snow came down. That means a man just fell off his bicycle in China. Or somebody’s won the lottery.”
“Does it?”
“Yes, it’s the butterfly effect. It’s true.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“That’s how things are.”
I go home for the second weekend. Out on loan. By the hour. Handled with care. And that evening I’m transported back as though I were plutonium. I get presents I don’t know what to do with. In the communal room there’s Elvis—Aloha from Hawaii on TV. I go back to my room, hide under the covers, and when I creep out again, time has jumped forward, I don’t know how it’s happened, but I’ve missed over three weeks and Mother is standing next to Jørn beside my bed, and she asks where I’ve put my jacket.
At first, I don’t understand anything, nobody’s said anything to me, not as far as I know, but it seems this is the day I’m to be let out, and Mother gets my jacket from the wardrobe, while I sit on the bed doing nothing, she places it beside me, excuses herself for a moment, leaves the room. Jørn sits in the visitor’s chair searching for something to say, but can’t think of anything, we don’t know each other very well, Mother must have contacted him, we don’t have a lot to say to each other, so I say:
“I hear you’ve started a band. What’s it called?”
“Perkleiva. Best band ever. Better than Feige Knep. You’ve got to come and hear us one day, we’ve got some shit-hot stuff going on.”
“Great.”
Mother returns with one of the nurses, they stand beside each other, both with arms crossed, looking like old friends.
“I think we’re ready to go,” says Mother, but
I don’t know whether it’s me she’s talking to, or the nurse. I get up anyway, obediently, put my jacket on.
“It was nice to meet you, Mattias, good-bye for now,” says the woman in white, as I follow Jørn and Mother out of the door.
“Nice to meet you too. Have a nice weekend.”
“It’s Tuesday, Mattias.”
“One can never be too early.”
“True. Look after yourself.”
We stand outside the large brick building while Mother looks for her car keys and exchanges pleasantries with Jørn. I feel like a stuffed animal, on the way between two exhibitions, automatically taking the pose I assume they want me in, but I don’t think either of them notices.
Mother asks Jørn if he’d like a lift, but he lives nearby, has a bicycle, it’s not far, but thanks. And then, to me:
“I’ll call you, in the next day or so. Maybe we can do something.”
“I’d like that,” I answer.
He nods to Mother and is about to go.
“Jørn,” I call after him, and he stops.
“Yes?”
“Will you call?
“Yes, of course. See you.”
“Yes,” I say, mostly to myself.
Then he goes. Again.
I prowl at my mother’s side over to the car, she’s practically parked the car in the middle of the road, frightened of it being blocked in by other cars. Clutching my plastic bag I wait. She opens the door, gets in and opens my side, I get in, pull the seat belt across my chest, check it’s fastened, Mother starts the car and we drive through town, through the streets, and home.