“So you’re still alive,” he said, in a flat tone.
“It only hurts when I laugh,” I answered, trying to be funny. But failing.
“How long have you been barricaded in, out there at Jæren?”
This certainly wasn’t how I’d anticipated things would be. I’d run through this a hundred times, our first conversation, how it might go. But Jørn wasn’t following the script.
“A few days,” I answered.
“Or a few weeks?”
“Maybe.”
“I’ll come out there this evening, around seven.”
I didn’t manage to answer. Jørn hung up and all I could do was wait, put the coffee on, even though I knew it wasn’t the coffee he was coming for.
I went in circles as I waited for his arrival. This was my chance, my opportunity to put everything right that had gone wrong, to start afresh. Somehow I hoped he’d walk through the door, sit down in one of the old chairs and that the conversation would flow naturally over the walls, as it had before I’d left. I wanted everything to stand still, like last year’s dust on the sill. But hardly anything stands still. Because the mountains rise, the continental plates shift every year, and old friendship rusts in the rain.
Jørn’s index finger hit my doorbell at five minutes and thirty seconds past seven. I’d missed that finger, I’d hoped it would do its job and ring countless times. But now I feared what it might bring with it.
Things began well. They began as they always had. The sharp tone he’d had over the phone was gone, and to the untrained eye everything looked as it always had, but deep inside I knew, from the instant he took off his shoes and walked into the living room, that this could be the last evening we’d talk.
He didn’t ask me about the Faroes. Didn’t ask me to explain why I’d been away so long, why I hadn’t been in touch for more than a year, although I knew we’d have to touch on the subject sooner or later. We talked about Jæren, about Perkleiva’s new album that had sold relatively well, we talked around the bush, around the houses, mumbled about old times, unable to quite reach each other, fumbled in the dark, it couldn’t be otherwise, and we were both relieved when Jørn suggested we take a trip to Checkpoint Charlie, and what did I think, we could drive into Stavanger, get a couple of beers for old times’ sake, Friday and stuff, and I answered yeah, of course we can.
The car ride in. The hour it took to drive. A gulf of silence between us all the way.
We walked in the open door of Checkpoint Charlie in Nedre Strandgate at just after nine, it was already getting overcrowded, they had cheap beer on Fridays, people crept out from under their stones and planted themselves on the stools around the bar, all the week’s ghosts. I found a little table in a corner at the back, sat there as Jørn went to buy the beers. I recognized a couple of faces at the other end, you always did here, Checkpoint lived up to its name. If you wanted to know what had become of them, your old acquaintances, old friends, people from school, the people who put your clothes in a bag and gave you the receipt in H & M, if you were looking for an update, this was the place to come.
I clocked in.
I was in place.
Out among people.
Jørn padded back with two beers, and then we sat there and waited for something to talk about, while the loudspeakers crackled and the bartender played old Garbage songs whose words nobody knew anymore, as ever more people piled into the venue, turning the air heavy and clammy. Some of Jørn’s friends turned up during the evening, first Roar, and not even he asked me what had happened, then later more arrived, a whole gang, and I was displaced, sat squashed between Jørn and a long-haired, bearded guy with a Trondelag dialect, didn’t recognize him straight off, but I’d met him before, his name was Jørgen and he was in the other band that had come to the Faroes, the Kulta Beats. Jørgen talked a lot, talked fast, one of the nicest guys I’d met for years. They’d given a concert on the previous day, up at Folken, together with Perkleiva, it had been wild, he said. I’d almost reached the bottom of my third beer and finally found something to say, excused myself and leaned over to Jørn and bellowed into his ear through Prodigy pouring out of the loudspeakers:
“Did you play yesterday? At Folken?”
“What?”
“Did you play at Folken yesterday?” I yelled.
“Yeah, you should have been there, Mattias!”
“You should have told me,” I said, and the moment the words had left my lips, he shot me a piercing look, the look I’d been dreading all along, he wanted to kill me, take my life there and then and put me out of my misery or something. Instead all he said was:
“You know you’d never have come, anyway.”
“How do you know? I might have,” I answered, injured.
“Like you give a shit.”
“What do you mean by that?” I could feel this was going to go wrong, very wrong.
“You know exactly what I mean. You haven’t called me in over a year! I have to call your parents to find out where you are, what you’re doing. I can’t fucking trust you an inch. You just fuck off somewhere! Or just don’t turn up. What the hell are you doing? Is it that stuff with Helle still? Is it? Are you still so fucking sore? Maybe it’s time to move on, stop behaving like Kurt fucking Cobain. You’ve got to see she couldn’t stay with you when you were so desperate to hide away all the time.”
“What’s your problem?”
“No, Mattias, what’s your problem? I don’t fucking know anymore. Okay, listen. You say you don’t want to be in a band, you don’t want to sing, even though you’re really good, and that’s fine, that’s really fine, but then what do you go and do? Yeah, you get drunk on the boat to the Faroes, and yell across the whole nightclub that you’re going to sing, you say you’ve changed your mind, you want to be our vocalist after all, and I’m so pleased, of course I am, I’ve always wanted to play with you. And then I offer you a thousand kroner if you go up on stage and sing with the band on the boat. But, oh no, you want more, fucking prima donna, you don’t want a thousand, you don’t want five thousand, not even ten, you want fifteen thousand kroner. So we all pitch in, put all the cash we have in an envelope for you, just because I really want the others to hear you, and okay, you sing, you do, and it’s fucking amazing, you still have the best voice I’ve ever heard, but afterwards you go AWOL, you refuse to give the money back. Fuck me. What do you do? Here’s what you do: when Christopher tries to take the envelope back, you run away, up to the deck, and you knock him down, you fucking punch him in the face, more than once. Did you know he had to go to the hospital? Eight fucking stitches in his face. Almost lost his hearing in one ear.”
The envelope stuffed with money.
The blood on my knuckles.
Havstein must have known all this, surely? Jørn must have told him when they talked in Tórshavn, I couldn’t imagine otherwise.
But nobody had said a word to me.
Marilyn Manson on max at Checkpoint, rock is deader than dead, and I can’t hear my own thoughts and only fragments from Jørn’s lips as they move, as I take long swigs of beer. I shout the lyrics to nobody in particular, shout them out of tune, and act as though my actions might have some kind of adequate defense.
“And then we’re forced to strap you down in the cabin until we get there, and I have to tell Christopher what’s been going on with you, so he won’t report you to the police. They had to cancel their concert, for fuck’s sake. And then you, you just disappear as soon as we land, wander off from everyone and everything. Jørgen here had to do the sound for us, Kulta Beats were canceled, Christ almighty, Christopher couldn’t sing with a smashed face. You should have gone to jail, do you realize? Or at least been put away. You’re sick in the head, do you know that?”
“Just like your brother. Maybe he and I could share a room?”
“That’s enough. Put your brakes on.” He pointed at me with the same index finger that had made contact with me at five past seven.
But
the brakes were off now, and there was only one way to go, downhill. The rest of the table sat silently and pretended they weren’t listening, it felt like the whole bar had shut up, as I watched all the conversations we’d shared through the years, everything we’d done together, blown away with the wind.
The bartender puts on the music from Jaws, or maybe that’s just something I imagine, anyway I get up to go to the bathroom and notice Jørn following me, I try to shake him off in the crowd, but it’s a laughable attempt, because he’s heading for the bathroom too, and I stand before the urinal and pull down my fly, try my best to look unruffled, but nothing comes out, my system has come to a full stop and the bartender plays Imperial March from Star Wars, or something that sounds like it, and Jørn grabs me by the jacket, tears me away from the urinal, and I fumble for my zipper, while other customers evacuate the room and Jørn shoves me up against the wall, same index finger between my eyes but with a different message.
“You’re running out on me again?” he bellows. “You’ve got some fucking nerve!”
“I had to pee! I …”
I search desperately through all the sentences I might say, but can’t find anything useful, because everything comes out wrong, and I want to tell him I don’t remember anything about what happened on the boat, I want to tell him I’m ill, that I’ve been ill but things are better, I’m back, it’ll be better, but I’m not sure that’s true anymore, and I’ve lost all perspective. Jørn punches me several times in the chest, although at half strength, and I sink to the ground before him, mumbling something about how he’s misunderstood me, and then two bouncers arrive, ask if there’s a problem, and despite us shaking our heads and Jørn saying no, nobody believes us, and we’re dragged through the door, down the hallway and out of the bar, dumped on some steps outside and told to get some fresh air, lots of fresh air, a few years’ worth.
We say nothing for half an hour. Just sit next to each other, staring into the ground.
But we don’t leave.
I don’t walk off.
Fuck no.
Finally I say something:
“I’d have liked to be at that concert. In Tórshavn. I don’t know what happened.”
“You vanished.”
“Everyone’s allowed to vanish once in while.”
“Yeah, but not many people vanish permanently. Why didn’t you call at least?”
“I was beyond coverage.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you ever seen the Big Dipper?”
“What?”
“I used to like sitting on the beach at Jæren trying to pick out the constellations. The Big Dipper was always the easiest to find. It stands out, very clearly. But if you go on looking, everything looks like the Big Dipper in the end. How can you be sure that the Big Dipper you see is the Big Dipper you’re meant to see?”
“I don’t get it.”
“Does your brother still live at Dale?”
He shook his head.
“No, he’s back home. He’s living with our parents.”
“Is he better?’
“He sits and stares at the wall. Sometimes he switches walls during the course of the day. But that’s mostly what he does. What did you do on the Faroes?”
“I was on vacation.”
“That was a long vacation.”
“Yes, I missed the boat.”
“For a whole year?”
“Time flies. And that’s not just something we say.”
“I heard you were committed.”
“No, but I was out of action. Suspended.”
“So why didn’t you call me? For a whole year? I’d have come and visited you, if you’d wanted. I’d have been there to help, if I’d have known.”
“I hardly remember anything. From the boat trip over, I mean. From those first days. All I remember is lying in a road, it was wet, raining, and I was walking against the wind. You should always walk against the wind, or you end up in the sea. And then I met Havstein.”
“Havstein was the man who met me in Tórshavn. Who said we could just leave without you, that you’d follow as soon as you were ready? A psychiatrist, wasn’t he? So you were committed over there?”
“Kind of. But I even didn’t know that myself.”
“Why were you committed?”
“I was trying to hide. And that wasn’t allowed. Have you ever been to the Caribbean?”
“No. Why?”
“No reason. I just wondered. I want to go there.”
“You’re welcome. I called your parents sometimes, now and then, just to hear if you were back. They couldn’t tell me a lot.”
“I don’t need a caseworker.”
“Don’t you need any friends either?”
I didn’t answer that. And he didn’t pursue it. There was a moment’s silence, before we changed the subject.
“They were good times,” he said quietly. “I read an article about Buzz Aldrin a few months ago, by the way. It said they carried out rigorous psychological tests on Aldrin before the launch of Apollo 11, they wanted to make sure that in eagerness to be the first man on the moon, or even possibly from shame of having to be the second, he wouldn’t shove Armstrong aside at the crucial moment before he stepped out of the LM.”
“I don’t believe he could have done that.”
“What if I told you he thought about it?”
“I wouldn’t believe you.”
“He did. For a few seconds he contemplated the consequences of doing it.”
“No.”
“In this article they called him Business Aldrin. He never disappeared. That’s just something you believe. He works for loads of organizations, makes tons of money writing books, giving talks, that sort of thing.”
I was speechless. It was news to me.
“And there are model toys of him, and he promotes Apple and JVC, Givenchy, Nortel Networks, Mastercard, massive companies, and he’s appeared on the David Letterman show a few times and lent his voice to The Simpsons. And fuck me if he isn’t contracted to four, FOUR autograph companies who take $400 for his autograph on some crappy press photograph! And then there’s that film, you saw it too, Toy Story. Buzz Lightyear. Sounds familiar, right? Maybe he never vanished after all. Maybe he did the opposite.”
I sat as stiff as a poker. Business Aldrin. The man who played his part and then vanished. I stared straight in front of me while Jørn went on about all the things Aldrin was involved in and how highly he seemed to think of himself and I felt myself getting angry, then I got terribly sad and I put my head in my hands, closed my eyes, thought how it wasn’t Aldrin’s fault, it was just the price he’d paid for subjecting himself to the world’s attention, of course it was impossible to vanish after that, when half the world was out to get as much as they could out of the second man on the moon. But it changed nothing. He would always be number two. It was me who had to become better at hiding away.
Jørn realized he’d said too much. Lit a cigarette and tried to be casual.
“So what did you think of the Olsok Festival on the Faroes? Pretty good, right? It was the best party I’ve ever been to, total chaos, Wild West in the Atlantic.”
“I don’t know.”
“Didn’t you get to go?”
“I didn’t go out much.”
“The whale slaughter, then? Did you get involved?”
“No. I watched one though,” I lied. “There haven’t been many pilot whales in the fjords during the last few years.” And then I made up some story about how Havstein had run into Sofia and I, one September day, yelling that pilot whales were on their way into one of the fjords, and then as the lead up to this story, I had to explain about Sofia and the Factory, and about Palli, and Anna, and I told him everything, though not from the beginning, and my story rambled on and on, it was the only way to tell it, I answered his questions, telling him what had happened that year, and the clocks ticked on and people staggered out of Checkpoint and the other bars and went
home or to private parties while we were back in an evening down by the shore so long ago, and I thought how I mustn’t leave anything out, because this might be the last time we’d talk, I wasn’t sure why I felt it, just that I feared it.
“Fucking hell,” said Jørn when I’d finally finished and told him just about everything, sandwiched in the description of a whale slaughter I’d never seen.
“And you’ll get your money back.” I said. “The fifteen thousand I mean.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“But, of course, you should have your money back.”
“They were good times,” he said again. “Don’t you think?’
“Yeah,” I said. “Good times.”
Jørn looked at his watch. It was late, time to pack up and go. We got up and stood there, both worse for wear.
“We’ll talk soon,” he said, shook my hand quickly before walking in the direction of the post office.
“We’ll talk,” I said and stood watching after him.
“Mattias!” he shouted a little way down the road.
“Yeah?”
“Look after yourself!”
I lifted a hand in reply, and then he turned again, went up the steps of the post office and disappeared behind the buildings.
I stood swaying in the alleyway, leaned forward until the air grabbed hold of me and I blew with the wind down toward one of the taxi stands near Vågen, stood nicely in line and waited my turn. I wasn’t the only one who wanted to go home. Almost everybody did. Home. But I was the one with the farthest to go. And I was standing there like a lemon, hands hanging at my sides, looking down at the ground when a hand slapped me on the back and stuck a half-eaten hot dog in my face.
“Well, well,” said the face that belonged to the hot dog.
I turned and saw Geir and a couple of other ghosts who’d been in my year at Hetland, some fifteen years ago. I was semi-embraced, the kind of hug nobody wants.
“Hi.”
“Well, well, well, what do you say?”
“Not a lot,” I answered.
“Christ, don’t you even say hi when an old classmate says hello?”
“I just said hi.”
“Are you trying to be funny, or what?”