A Time for Everything

Coda

THE INHABITANTS of the Norwegian coast must have been nonplussed by the flocks of seagulls that began to appear toward the end of the eighteenth century, and they must have been amazed, perhaps even intimidated, by the strange mixture of aggressive persistence and wariness, of sagacity and simplicity, that these creatures displayed. Unlike other birds, they associated with people and hung like a veil in the wind after fishing boats, giving their melancholy wail — kyyyyow-kyyyow-kyow-gah-gah-gah — while always being careful to keep their distance, and refusing to pick up food the fishermen threw to them before they saw it floating on the surface. With astonishing deftness they would then dive and take the prize in their beaks, only to lose it again in the violent scuffle that always followed, the melee of thrashing wings and greedy cries, which each day filled the air above inlets and bays the whole length of the coast, and gradually extended inland during the twentieth century, when the spectacle of enormous flocks of gulls gathering on the landfill sites on the edges of cities became more and more common, as if they’d used their time on the coast to train and now were at last prepared to take up the cudgels against the rats, pigeons, dogs, and cats that had once driven them out. They even settled deep in the countryside, where they followed the tractor across the fields, as if it were a fishing boat on the water.

The origin of seagulls is uncertain. The first Norwegian to describe them was Peder Claussøn Friis, priest of Audnedal and Stavanger, in 1632 in his work The True Description of Norway and Its Surrounding Isles, which contains the following mysterious statement about them: These are the first summer birds to arrive in spring: seagulls, shoregulls, black gulls. That’s all. Although this doesn’t tell us when or how they developed, the description is nevertheless invaluable, as it allows us to state with absolute certainty that there were gulls in Norway at the beginning of the seventeenth century. That gulls existed before that time is quite possible, but no one can corroborate it. As we know, evolutionists maintain that all life originally came from the sea, in the shape of single-celled organisms that over time came together, gradually becoming more complex and specialized, in accordance with the demands made by their environments, and controlled by the principle that the best adapted always survived, so some remained unchanged, some died out, and some developed in new directions. This, according to evolutionists, applies to all living things, and, of course, to seagulls. Some of them quite seriously believe that birds have developed from dinosaurs, while more moderate theories say that modern birds are descended from certain primeval ones, coarser and simpler than those of today. They claim that fossils prove them right, but fossils show only that other creatures have existed on earth. The development hasn’t left any trace, and when they say they can read the past by studying signs in nature, they do no more than the Assyrians and Babylonians did when they looked for portents of the future in viscera or the night sky. It may seem impressive, but science it isn’t, except in name.

The only thing we really know about seagulls in Norway is that there were three kinds in 1632: seagulls, shoregulls, and black gulls. Furthermore we know that something happened to these gull species about a hundred years later. They underwent a kind of change. Their wings got a trifle longer, their feathers a trifle whiter, their knees a trifle gristlier. Their behavior became more aggressive, while a streak of shrewdness simultaneously began to manifest itself in their character. This was the change the inhabitants of the Norwegian coastal regions witnessed at the start of the eighteenth century. A new kind of gull had arrived. It looked like an ordinary gull, it moved like an ordinary gull, it sounded like an ordinary gull, and it behaved like an ordinary gull. But with some small and, for the custom-rooted Norwegians, almost spectacular differences. It followed them! For days it might hover in the wind above their boats. And in the instant they sliced the head off a fish, it came diving down and grabbed guts and intestines with its strong yellow beak. No other bird had done this before. And while other birds kept a constant distance from man, whether it was the tame bird’s extreme proximity or the bird of prey’s haughty aloofness, the gull’s distance altered continually, and that was the strange thing, how the distance between this new bird and man was regulated by things beyond the purely spatial.

When I grew up in the 1980s, there were seagulls everywhere. Each morning, on the estate where we lived, I awoke to hear them screaming on the grass in front of the houses, and when I closed the door behind me and, with satchel strapped to my back, began to walk toward the main road, the sudden noise made them take wing, flapping and crying. There was something loathsome about them, perhaps because of the nakedness and openness of their bodies, which sat so badly with the impression they otherwise gave: gluttonous, brutal, primitive. Or maybe it was because I knew what they were capable of. During the war in my grandfather’s time, they were always supposed to be circling above the battlefields, and sometimes would land on dead soldiers while they were still warm and the battle still raged around them. We used to hurl stones at them, but of course they were too quick for our slow, childish movements, and took off without difficulty long before the stones could reach them. Only when some of the older boys got hold of saloon rifles were they seriously threatened. I remember clearly how we’d go off to the scrap heap on Saturday mornings, hot on the heels of the older boys, who would take up position in the woods above the heap and begin to let loose at the screaming gulls, and the jubilation when, on some rare occasion, someone scored a bull’s-eye and the bird hit the ground, spasms racking its body for minutes afterward. I could never share their enthusiasm, in some odd way my sympathies were displaced; suddenly it was my young neighbors who were loathsome. When I think about them now, their freckled faces, red heads, and lean bodies mingle in my imagination with the sweet, moldy smell of the garbage heap, as if they were two sides of the same coin, that this is the real landscape of childhood: a mountain of wrecked furniture, broken fridges, stoves and radio cabinets, smashed crockery, garbage bags full of outdated clothes, old newspapers and magazines, old-fashioned bottles and cast-off games, all bathed in bright spring sunshine, surrounded by forest stillness. Occasionally we caught glimpses of roe deer, foxes, badgers, elk, weasels, and mice, as well as all the birds of the district, but none of this impinged on us at all, we’d simply been dumped there, a crowd of kids on an estate in the middle of the forest, and it was this lack of belonging that we shared with the gulls, for what were marine birds like them doing here, so far away from the open sea? The common assumption was that they were sponging off us, rather like rats. Nobody considered that they might be yearning for us. That that was why they lived so close to our world.

I had no notion of this until the summer of the year I turned thirteen, when, late one evening, my dad, my brother, and I set out to go crab fishing. This was an unusual event in itself, normally my father never did anything with us, preferring to stay in his office in the basement, silent and somber and tormented. When he did come up, he often flew into rages, so that our relationship with him was one of fear and apprehension rather than love. But occasionally he would become mild and amiable, as on this evening when he came in to us and asked if we wanted to go for a trip in the boat. We did. The streets were empty as we walked down to the floating jetties in the late summer darkness, no gaze fell on us, and I saw how this put him at his ease; he leaped gaily aboard, took the equipment we handed to him, rolled up the covering, loosened the moorings, started the engine, backed slowly out of the slip, put it in gear, and set out across the sound, standing in front of the front thwart. That was how he liked it. All the families on the estate had boats, it was the main occupation out there, trips to the inshore islands on weekends and during holidays, fishing in the evening after work, unless you just stayed put and puttered about onboard with something that wasn’t quite as it should be while the boat was moored or laid up for the winter. Many of the children had their own boats, and large parts of our formative years were spent down at the docks, where everything that happened was noted and talked about. For a long time ours was the only family without a boat, as my dad spent all his spare time on his garden, which was certainly unique in its mixture of rampant fertility and military precision, but which had, more than anything else, an air of hopelessness about it because none of the neighbors shared his interest and so made it seem like the limit of refinement lying there like some island in a sea of wrecked cars, caravans, garages, concrete mixers, slipped rock banks, and heaps of earth. We weren’t allowed to walk on the grass in our garden, no one was, and the other youngsters were as scared of him as we were, although they laughed at him in secret too. Could it have been that he wanted to make amends for this state of affairs when all at once he made up his mind to buy a boat? He’d phoned up from town and told us to go down to the jetties. My brother and I went there with our mother, and after half an hour he came planing into the sound in the new boat. His face lit up like a child’s when he caught sight of us. But we weren’t the only ones there. Other kids had gathered to see what was going on, every new boat arriving was an event, and this one especially, being ours. Initially they were just inquisitive, I think, they expressed themselves like connoisseurs once the boat was close enough for them to see what type it was and what sort of engine it had, but their curiosity turned to malicious pleasure when Dad was about to come alongside. I suppose he must have been fearing this moment all the way home, and had therefore planned each step in advance, because there was no hesitation in his actions when the speed slackened and the boat began to glide toward the landing dock. An arc, he must have thought, reduce speed and steer in a simple arc in among the pontoons. But he hadn’t made enough allowance for water resistance, and he sailed slowly past the slips as we stood watching, the tense body that didn’t know what to do, other than needing to hide its uncertainty behind movements that were always equally assured. The boat slid past, he wanted to reverse, but instead put on speed, and with a roar crashed into the stern of the cabin cruiser alongside. The kids around us laughed. I was mortified by the whole thing and had to distance myself from my dad, and laughed with them.

Did he see me?

Yes, he did. Just as he finally got the motor into reverse, he glanced up at us, and saw that I was laughing too. His gaze filled me with fear, I knew he’d have a go at me later on. Strangely enough, I was wrong. He never said a word about the incident.

He backed out about fifty yards before trying again, this time more carefully, but even so the same thing happened again, the boat drifted away, and he stood as if paralyzed behind the wheel as the boat floated past us a second time. Out again. When the same thing happened the third time, he gave up, motioned my mother onto the pontoon and threw the rope to her, and she hauled the boat in so that he could get ashore and push the boat into the right place. He was a respected man in most matters, and perhaps that was why the laughter among the onlookers was so free that evening. But he’d made up his mind, and didn’t give in, even though he must have known that a number of humiliations lay ahead. Another problem arose during the summer and autumn, it got harder and harder to make the boat plane, and one day he went over to some of the older boys and began talking to them, in a kind of quasi-technical, jocular sort of way, the thought of which makes me blush even now, years later, peppered as it was with references to boats, cars, and engines. With seeming casualness, he maneuvered the conversation around to his own boat, why it was getting less and less responsive, what did they think could be the matter? They followed him over to his boat, squatted down, and scrutinized the hull for a few seconds.

“Well?” my father asked.

“Haven’t you ever heard of growth, Mr. Vankel?”

They would never have used that tone with him if he hadn’t entered their special area of expertise.

“Growth?” said Dad. “But the boat’s plastic!”

This rejoinder quickly spread through the estate and long remained a byword whenever anyone wanted to express incomprehension about something. But the boat’s plastic!

Over the next few days I was dispatched to the boat with a scraper, snorkel, and face mask to clean off all the algae that had attached itself to the hull. There I lay for hours, the butt of general derision, splashing around in the cold water and scraping away until my skin was numb and my limbs stiff with cold. He couldn’t even manage to do that right; the boat should have been lifted out and put into drydock over at the yard, of course, where he could have scraped the bottom and put on the chemicals in a matter of hours, a fact that the onlookers never failed to point out.

Even though now, a year later, he’d learned from his mistakes and mastered the necessary seamanship to some extent, he didn’t like it. Boating had joined the long list of things to be avoided without us noticing the fact, after all we’d grown up with the idea that he never went to the hairdresser but always cut his own hair, that he never took the bus, that he never shopped at the local shop but always at shopping centers miles away, that we never had visitors at home, that he never touched us or our mother, that he never played soccer or went skiing or skating, like the other dads, but always sat in his office listening to music, classical music — with tears in his eyes, as I discovered one afternoon when I went to fetch my bicycle pump from the back of the house and happened to look in the cellar window as I went past. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known he was there. But now I cupped my hands and bent down. His head was only eighteen inches away from me. He was swaying backward and forward to the music, his eyes were closed, tears streamed down his cheeks. Shocked, I jerked my head back. All the rest of that day I couldn’t think of anything else, and each time that image of him welled up, my heart beat harder within me. But it didn’t make me feel sorry for him, on the contrary: I only felt even more scared. It made his fits of temper seem even more sinister.

The boat passed under the bridge, and for a few seconds the sound of the engine became hollow and cavernous. I glanced up at the carriageway, rocking slightly in the darkness above us. When we passed this spot during the day, it was possible to see the stone piers of the old bridge on the bottom nearer to the shore, and there were rumors that vehicles with corpses inside them were there as well, casualties of the time the bridge was blown up toward the end of the war. We had never seen anything, even though we went diving there every summer, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t right. There were plenty of places in the vicinity with skeletons from those times. The best-known was Roligheten, a clearing in the forest a few miles farther inland, where several hundred men had been executed; group after group had been ordered to kneel before a trench, blindfolded, hands tied behind their backs, shot in the neck, and kicked in, and for several days after the trench had been filled in, you could see how the ground undulated like the sea as the gas made the bodies swell. The hottest summer on record, it bubbled and simmered under there continuously, sometimes small fountains of blood spurted up from the ground. The stench must have been unendurable. After the war they decided that the grave should remain as it was, and apart from a monument on the edge of the forest, a kind of obelisk with a commemorative plaque to the fallen, there isn’t anything now to mark that clearing out from any other. Perhaps the grass is still a little greener and lusher, that’s all. I first went there on a class visit and subsequently read every description of the event I came across, because there was something fascinating about it, mainly because of the sensational awfulness of what had happened, of course, but also because it displayed a truth of a different kind to anything I’d come across up until then. It robbed the participants of everything apart from their bodies, executioners and executed alike, those who left that place alive and those who were left there to rot. No spirit, no humanity, no feelings, no concepts of good or evil, only eyes and mouths, hair and teeth, rib cages and arms, kneecaps and soles, grass and trees, earth and water, air and sunlight, and blue, blue sky.

My brother, with whom I sometimes discussed this, usually brushed it aside by saying that I’d have thought differently if the dead had been close to me, and I agreed with him. Yes, maybe so, I’d say, but deep down I knew it wasn’t true; no one in my life was important enough for that, not even him, my brother, sitting next to me now on the bench in the wispy darkness of a summer evening as we passed the two gas tanks and could make out the electric glow from the town as a faint vaulted dome of light between the forested hills. He meant nothing to me. Neither did my father, I thought as I turned, looked out across the sound between the two islands, at the black, even surface of the water, at the pulse from the lighthouse, the way it splintered the darkness into short intervals, as if something were being opened and closed, the rapid beating of a heart. .

We pushed slowly past the shipyard and the new housing estate, always accompanied by the even drone of the engine, the swish of the bow cleaving the water. We passed the line of deserted bunkers, which I wouldn’t have seen if I hadn’t known they were there, surrounded as they were by the duskiness of trees, then all the holiday homes among the drumlins, then the naval base, with its gray-painted, faceless warships, which were always moored there, as if closed in on themselves. I’d begun to feel cold, and was glad we were almost there. It was nearly ten o’clock, I saw and met my father’s gaze. He smiled at me. I smiled back.

“Will you do the rope, Henrik?” he called.

I nodded, grabbed the rope, and got onto the deck as he slackened speed and bent forward to find the grapnel. A few minutes later we were on our way up the island. The black sea rocks still radiated warmth. We’d landed near the older of the two lighthouses — it stood in darkness in the middle of the island and seemed to draw all the lines of the landscape toward it — and dropped our things against its white wall. Dad got out a thermos of coffee, handed out plastic cups, poured, and lit a cigarette.

The gulls that had taken screaming to the air when we arrived were still circling above us. When we walked down to the sea on the other side, they dive-bombed us, more aggressively than I’d ever known before. They must be sitting on eggs close by, I thought, and raised the shaft of the landing net above my head. They must have reckoned it was part of my body, as their attacks halted above it, and then they flew up again to gather themselves for the next dive. Even so my heart was in my mouth.

“It’s all right!” Dad shouted. “They’re not dangerous!”

He stood waiting on a ledge of rock with Klaus. Carefully I began to walk down. Three of them followed me. They screeched out their ugly cries each time they came winging out of the dark, and didn’t stop until I was on the sea rocks. When I turned to look at them, one was being chased by the other two, first across the sea, then up toward the lighthouse, where I lost sight of them.

Dad had stopped down at the water’s edge and set his bag on the rock. When he began to undress I wasn’t quite sure what to think.

“Are you going swimming now?” I asked.

“We’re going crab fishing, son!”

I’d been crab fishing with other parents, I knew the drill, it was simple: you shone a light down into the water and then scraped up the crabs that collected on the rock, either with a rake or a landing net.

In only his underpants he bent forward and took out a towel and swimming trunks from his bag, wrapped the towel around his waist, put his hand underneath and worked his pants off, and drew on his trunks, while I stood looking at the rock in front of me. Couldn’t he have changed without using a towel? There was no one else out here. And if there had been, they wouldn’t have seen anything, enveloped in darkness as we were.

Dad took out his face mask, snorkel, and flippers. The air was still filled with the protests of gulls. I turned and saw them flying to and fro over the little island, like thoughts that remain disturbed and disquieted long after the tension of the situation that unleashed them has abated.

“Can you hold the bucket ready, Klaus?” Dad said.

Klaus nodded.

Dad put on his equipment and waddled the last few yards to the edge of the water. Whether it was his skinny legs or the childish face mask or the obvious pleasure he radiated at finally doing something together with us, at any rate I felt a spasm of tenderness for him. He didn’t know how to go about crab fishing, but had decided to do it his way, for our sakes. The least I could do for him, I thought, was to show a little enthusiasm.

“Is it cold?” I shouted, after he’d jumped in and lay splashing in the water, with that ridiculous mask over his face and the flashlight waving in his hand.

He removed the mouthpiece.

“No, no,” he said. “Just follow me.”

Then he put the mouthpiece back and began to swim across, seeming to glide above the bottom in the dark water, twitching his flippers occasionally to keep on course. I met Klaus’s gaze. He only shook his head, and we smiled at each other.

Perhaps five minutes passed. Then Dad lifted his head out of the water, pulled the mask onto his forehead.

“There aren’t any crabs here!” he shouted. “Let’s go over there.”

He pointed, and we began to walk across the slabs while he swam by beside us, Klaus still clutching the red bucket.

I could hardly bear to think of what it would be like if he didn’t get any crabs at all. Far too much capital had been invested.

For a long while he lay motionless in the new location he’d chosen. The beam from the flashlight, refracted in the water, gathered like a ball of light in front of him. His breath whistled in and out of the snorkel. I crouched down, rubbing my bare forearms. The seagulls had calmed down at last, and apart from the almost imperceptible clunking of the water slapping on the rock, everything was still. In a few places silvery patches on the surface of the water reflected the weak sheen of the gloaming. A ship blazed with light on the horizon. It must be the ferry to Denmark, I thought. Just then Dad’s flippers moved and he dived to the bottom. Klaus got up and went down to the edge of the rock, and was standing ready with the red bucket when, twenty seconds later, Dad surfaced again with a bristling crab in one hand.

A narrow plume of water shot out of the snorkel. Then he took off his mask, held on to the seaweed with one hand as he thrust the crab over to Klaus with the other.

“There are lots more down there!” he said.

His skin was white with cold. But he didn’t seem to notice, just swam out again and pulled out crab after crab, not stopping for half an hour, by which time the bucket was full of crawling and restless creatures that were constantly rubbing against each other with a bonelike rustle. He was shivering as he stood drying himself with a towel, but he was in a good mood, and told us to search for fuel for a bonfire while he changed. I kept down on the sea rocks so as not to disturb the many gulls, and by the time I’d been around the entire islet, I had my arms full of driftwood, dry as tinder after the long, hot summer.

When I arrived, Dad and Klaus had seated themselves in a grassy hollow in front of a fire that lit up a wide circle of rocks around them. The reddish yellow gleam from the flames seemed to form an inlay in their otherwise shadowy faces. To avoid having to use my hands to get up there, I made a detour, following a gently ascending spine of rock behind them, and as I was about to turn down again, I saw something white against the darkness of the rock in front of me, stopped, and knelt down: it was a dead seagull. I put my wood down and felt it. Its body was still warm. Presumably it was the one that had been chased by the others, I thought. The ground surrounding it was covered in feathers. I saw the thickening at the joints of the thin legs, the reptile-like fold of skin between the claws, the empty eyes, and was filled with nausea.

“Come along and sit down!” Dad called. “We’re going back home soon!”

I picked up my wood, carried it to the fire, and sat down next to them. Dad handed me the bag of sausages and a skewer. Then he took out a Coke from the freezer bag and opened it for me. He really had thought of everything tonight.

“What were you looking at just now?” he asked.

I speared a sausage and held it over the flames, took a sip of Coke before answering.

“A dead seagull,” I said.

“Sure it’s dead?” he asked.

I nodded.

He tilted his head back without shifting his gaze, as he often did, and crossed one foot over the other. I’ve since noticed myself sitting in precisely the same attitude in photographs. And that’s odd, because I’ve never had any desire to be like him, but, on the contrary, I’ve always cultivated the things that separated us.

“Did you know that seagulls were angels once?” he said.

He lied about everything, but his lies were various; this one fortunately was only meant to tease us.

“I didn’t know that,” I said, and laughed. I could hear how forced it sounded.

The ferry to Denmark glided slowly past on the sea behind him. Its many small lights made it look like an enormous chandelier, I thought. Shortly after came the throb of its engines, somber and secretive, and the first waves began to wash ashore below us. I took the sausage out of the flames, blew on the shining skin. It was covered in black crusts and small, soft blisters. I noticed how my mouth had filled with saliva as I took the first bite. No one spoke, and the silence started to grow oppressive, it reminded us all that this wasn’t how it was meant to be. A father out with his two sons, round a fire, with sausages and Coke, shouldn’t the conversation between them be light and jokey?

Dad sat staring into the flames. I watched him furtively, his high forehead, his thick, black hair, the marked rounding of the back of his head as it turned down toward the neck. The fleshy lips that caused an imbalance in his otherwise clean-cut features, and that, together with his oddly light eyes, gave his face an impression of susceptibility that bordered on the defenseless, as if you saw something you weren’t meant to see when you looked at him.

“What a load of crabs we got!” I said.

Klaus sent me a look full of disdain. And I knew what it meant: we weren’t supposed to help him.

But Dad smiled.

“I’ll cook them when we get home,” he said. “Then there’ll be crab for supper tomorrow.”

He put another stick on the fire, folded his hands round his knees, as if he were still cold, looked at us one after the other.

“There are more sausages,” he said. “But no more Coke.”

We sat there for maybe a quarter of an hour more. Then he got up and began packing things away, sent Klaus down for some water to douse the fire, and just as he’d gone, turned to me.

“Where did you find the seagull?”

I pointed up toward it.

“Come along,” he said. “I’ll show you something.”

He switched the flashlight on and began to walk up the gently sloping ridge. I followed him.

“There,” I said when we got to the place.

Dad squatted down, handed me the flashlight, and carefully picked up the gull. It looked almost alive in the concentrated light. Dad spread out the wings and pushed some of its breast feathers aside.

“Can you see?” he asked.

“What?” I said.

“Come right up close, then you’ll see.”

I bent forward. And then I saw it. A tiny little arm, no longer than the tip of my finger, thin as a piece of wire, lay against its breast under the wing.

“It’s a hand,” Dad said. “Can you see?”

I nodded.

There were even nails on the pine-needle-thin fingers.

“Can I feel it?”

“If you’re careful.”

He raised the gull to me and I brushed the small hand with my fingertips. The pressure moved it slightly back and forth.

“You’ll see five fingers if you look,” he said.

“Why is it so small?”

“They don’t need them anymore. So they’ll disappear eventually. It’s the same as our little toes. They’ll get smaller and smaller, and eventually disappear too.”

He leaned forward and laid the gull on the ground again, folding up its wings carefully. Its yellow eyes glinted in the light.

A hissing noise came from below as Klaus threw water on the fire. Dad got up and took the flashlight from me. But he made no move to go. Even though he stood in the dark, and I couldn’t see his face properly, I knew he was staring at me. Neither of us spoke. Slowly he turned the flashlight beam on my face.

“Are you scared of me?” he said.

FIFTEEN years later he was dead. And so violent were the circumstances surrounding his death that it not only altered our future, but also our past. If he’d died in a car accident or slowly succumbed to illness, everything would have remained as it was, but the wildness of what he finally did had retrospective force, and now in some strange way is present in the whole of our childhood. A kind of coldness has spread through it, something solemn that we didn’t know about at the time, but that now colors everything that happened, even the most trivial and humdrum of the things we did. And it’s a disquieting thought that not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time for every purpose under heaven. One single second, one single landscape, in which what happens activates and deactivates what has already happened in endless chain reactions, like the processes that take place in the brain, perhaps, where cells suddenly bloom and die away, all according to the way the winds of consciousness are blowing.

But if it’s true that events in the past open and close and constantly form new associations with what’s happening in the present, where does the notion that the past is fixed and finished come from? Nothing is ever finished, everything just goes on and on, there are no boundaries, not even between the living and the dead, even that zone is quivering and unclear.

Some years ago I read an article about a woman who lived in the United States in the 1950s, who’d fallen ill with cancer. Biopsies were taken, and these were kept alive and experimented with, until a clumsy laboratory assistant somehow managed to drop them on the floor, from where they spread into the outside world, and still exist to this day. These organisms proved themselves to be exceptionally viable. They are everywhere, even here, around me, fifty years later. That woman is long since dead, but her body lives on, and is constantly expanding. I find this terrifying.

What is manifesting itself here?

From experience, I always trust blindly in intuition. The fact that it always gets to the scene of the crime before my thoughts must mean either that it’s more observant, and gets a head start that way, or that it’s simply faster. It gets there first anyway. While thoughts, those slothful constables of the consciousness, have barely got moving, intuition is already at work examining what is going on. And whereas thoughts, when they finally do show up, can rely only on other thoughts in their gathering of information, and are therefore often left moving in circles, or end up in mutual antagonism, intuition has access to the subconscious, those depths where material from the outside world constantly pours in through the sluices of emotion and the senses, right down to minute shifts in surroundings that the thoughts never pick up, and whose consequences therefore are apparent to me only when I dream, or when a seemingly insignificant feeling interposes itself between me and the situation I’m in.

What is the scary thing about this expansion?

And why are the limited, the closed-off, and the local synonymous with sterility and narrow-mindedness, while the open and boundless are everywhere seen as absolute good, as fruitful, as broad-minded? There are countless people who refuse to be labeled, who energetically work to open the moment, stretch out the now in all directions, a contemporaneousness that takes up ever more room. There is more of that. But this expansion, acting within culture, is only illusory, opening up is only another way of closing off. The expansion is serial, the pattern that of the tree: the increase is more of the same, copied, and copied again. It’s inhuman.

Or perhaps not?

Perhaps that’s precisely what it isn’t. For if you shut your eyes and let your thoughts relax as your body gradually liberates itself from its many links with the outside world, and you follow your intuition into the bounded landscape that is yourself, what is it you see?

At first the familiar things — the old prejudices, the long-deserted thoughts, the oldest memories, which, forever congealed and divorced from their surroundings, exist inside you rather like stuffed animals do in natural history museums, forever caught in their own characteristic pose — but then, gradually, as you near the walls through which blood streams, things will become stranger and stranger, and by the time you are taken up by and enter the red, soft, evenly flowing river to be carried slowly down through the offshoots toward the heart, and hear for the first time that quiet rush, which is there every day, and for the first time see the myriad of blood corpuscles, those beautiful disc-shaped organisms that, after a short maturing process, leave the marrow and float out into the blood, where they work in gigantic swarms until after four months in the service of the blood they return to the marrow to be destroyed, it’s clear that you are a system you can’t control, and what is you is also outside you.

The heart beats, the lungs breathe, the blood flows.

But for whom?

That, you see, is the question.

Right now they’re doing it to maintain what you call you, but if you were in an accident, your heart might be surgically removed from your body and put into someone else, where it would continue to beat as if nothing had happened. As far as the heart is concerned, everyone is the same. All it wants to do, all it knows how to do, all it can do, is beat. Like some small, smooth, shiny beast, bathed in blood, it lies inside the chest and opens, closes, opens, closes. First the blood comes into the auricle as into a sluice, until it’s full up and the valve closes. Then it rushes on into the ventricle, which the following instant is compressed by its lateral muscles, so that the blood is practically crushed out into the arteries, whose elastic walls first swell with the pressure and then contract again in a way that keeps the blood flowing forward all the time. Warm and soft and calm, it flows on into the body’s darkness, up the aorta ascendens, past those dirty gray twins the lungs, through the arteries of the throat and into the brain, where it branches out into ever-narrower galleries and shafts, a chaos of needle-thin capillaries so constricted that even the microscopic blood corpuscles are distorted as they glide along them. It’s here that gases and materials are exchanged with the surrounding tissue fluids. Molecules are detached, seep through membranes, become part of new compounds on the other side, and are taken from there on into the landscape of the brain, which is irrigated with nutrition. The body may be sleeping, but the activity is just as great. Electrons fly up and down the nerve paths, the blood throbs at the temples, cells are activated and deactivated, all according to the pictures the current dream demands. Respiration is maintained, digestion is maintained, the separation of waste products is maintained, as well as the distribution of nutrients; new cells are produced, old ones are destroyed, a watch on the surroundings is always kept: a sudden noise, a hard touch, a bright light, and the eyes open right away.

But for the moment all is calm. An electric impulse fires down a nerve fiber, is deflected, and sets off a chemical process as it touches a cell, which interacts with its neighboring cells, and an image of a spruce forest is brought to life. Heavy branches, green pine needles, black trunks, wet earth. From there a link is made to the smell of pine branches and soil and rotting leaves. A hand pushes a branch aside, back there is a mountain, bare and glistening gray in the dull rainy light. It’s completely quiet. Suddenly there’s the feeling that others are present. The head is raised, the eyes lifted: up in the tree sits a crow. It makes no move to fly away, just perches there with its claws around the branch and its gaze on the forest. The black eyes are shiny and still as two stones. Then, far up the mountainside, the foot is lifted toward a fissure, gets a hold, the weight is transferred, the other foot follows, but just then the hand loses its grip and a great fear spreads, but without being followed by any pain, just a new picture, this time of being inside a lifeless body at the bottom of a kind of shaft, and being lifted up by two men, and feeling one’s neck hanging and lolling, and knowing that one’s eyes are dead and that all one’s organs are dead, but still being there, inside the dead body, mad with fear, and then screaming.

I started awake and stared out into the room in front of me. It felt as if I’d occupied an empty body, for a scream died out just as I opened my eyes, and I realized that it had done all this without me: sat up in bed, clenched its fists, tilted its head back, opened its mouth, and screamed. All the time its eyes had been closed, turned inward on the brain’s terrible imaginings, which disappeared the moment I awoke. But it remained under their influence for a few seconds more, gasping for breath, beating its heart, working on the theory that something terrible had happened, without realizing that it lay alone in a peaceful bedroom on an island far out to sea.

I sat there for a long time gazing ahead of me as the impressions from the nightmare were slowly forced back by what I saw. The white curtains that trembled in the breeze from the window, the grayish linoleum floor, all the papers that covered it, the suitcase that gaped open by the wall, the shadow of my winter coat in the open cupboard, the embroidery of Jesus and the souvenir plate from the coastal steamer on the wall above the desk, the computer, the pile of books next to it, and on the floor beneath. The names on their spines were only just legible in the faint morning light, and not without pleasure I let my gaze wander over them. Blake, Örn, Thorvaldsen, Poe, Andersen, Rudbeck, Zola, Stevenson, Berwald. Then I bent down and picked up the towel from the floor, wiped the sweat from my chest and forehead, and laid down again in the bed. It was only then I noticed the wind outside. It must have risen while I slept. And then the acceptance of sounds that arise during sleep must have been continued into wakefulness, I thought. How else could I have missed hearing the racket that was going on out there? The cellar door was shifting on its hinges, the broken gutter scraped and thumped against the wall, the windowpane rattled, the vent in the bathroom opened and closed in rapid trills, which occasionally, especially in variable gusts, resembled the sound of chattering teeth. Then suddenly everything might go quiet, and for a few seconds it was possible to hear the low, continuous rush that was always there, like a generator that goes on humming even when the workman’s drill is switched off, until new squalls arose and the entire apparatus was set in motion again.

I remembered how frightened I would get as a child when I awoke to storms like these. In my thoroughly animated world, where I sensed the special personality and presence of everything, the wind had been by far the most frightening character. It hunted furiously through the landscape, shook every tree, lifted every bush, smashed wave after wave against the land. It even made attempts on the house. Wide awake I’d lie in the dark and hear the wind press against the walls searching for openings, the howl that arose when it forced its way down a drainpipe, the creaking that crossed the floorboards in the attic, the sudden banging of a door in the basement. The strange thing was that I was frightened even though I knew it was only the wind. Reason made no impression on fear, it was so much stronger and had so many allies that all it needed was a little waft of anxiety and it would kick over the traces of the will and come chasing through me, conquering part after part until it was master of me and I lay paralyzed in bed and waited for them to stoop over me, those dead men who’d come rushing up from the forest and into the garden, where I could hear their breathing, rising and falling, only a thin wall away.

I had at least gained something from the intervening years, I thought, and smiled. Like one of those endangered species that begins to pop up in habitats that previously have been alien to them, my fear, driven gradually from bastion to bastion, had finally sought refuge in my dreams. It was the only place left where it could still dominate me. There was no longer anything frightening about storms or dead people, on the contrary, there was something soothing about the sounds outside, their repetitions were soporific, and when I pulled the duvet half over my head and closed my eyes, I tried to make my thoughts follow them in the hope that they would lead me into sleep again, glide along the breakwater and in toward the landing, bump against the wall of the boathouse, be forced out into the bay, there to be caught up by the fluttering passing winds that funneled up the corridor between the low mountain ridges leading to the lighthouse, puffing and snorting like a team of horses, from where they could stream across the open sea once again and not meet an obstacle until they struck the mainland a few miles farther in and, exhausted by the crossing, only just manage to blow through the trees on the ridge by the fjord, there finally to reach the quaking zone where the outer imperceptibly merged with the inner and all connection between me and my surroundings ceased.

When I awoke again, it was completely still outside. Rested, I sat up in bed and looked at my cell phone on the bedside table to see what the time was. Half past eleven. I put it back, stretched my arms over my head, and yawned. Then I got up and went to the window, opened the curtains, released the catch, and opened it. Slowly the cool air flowed into the room. I felt how its touch made my skin tighten, and I stroked the stiff hairs of my forearm as I peered out.

The sea lay heavy and calm between the small islands. Near the shore the surface was smooth as silver, here and there seemingly illuminated by the reflection of the sandy bottom, farther out dimmed by mist that stood like a wall around the island. In places the dark, smooth boards of the landing reflected the red color of the boathouses that leaned over them, dimly, like a sensation or a vague memory. A rope hung inert from a cleat on the top of the wall, some nets lay in a jumbled heap in front of the rough door, a rusty car battery and a can of formic acid stood next to it.

There wasn’t a movement to be seen anywhere. Even the boats along the quay were motionless. Absence of life gave the scene a strange model-like atmosphere, as if it had been assembled by a group of curators, I thought, and at any moment the public might come flooding in through a carefully camouflaged door somewhere in the horizon, full of admiration for all the true-to-life detail to which their young guide was constantly drawing their attention. The half-erased logos on the empty fish crates stacked against the wall of the boathouses; the rainwater in the two tubs next to them, yellowish against the white of the plastic; the slack in the shaggy mooring ropes coiling on the water’s surface; the empty crab shells glimmering on the rock slab farther off, bleached by weeks of rain. All that was missing was a papier-mâché fisherman, I thought, who, knife in hand, could be stooping over the day’s catch. And maybe a few papier-mâché gulls suspended on clear thread from the ceiling.

Just then the door of the neighboring house opened, and as the lanky figure began to walk across to the dock with a rusty gasoline can in his hand, the heart of the landscape suddenly began to beat again. He placed the can on the edge of the dock, climbed down the ladder, and pulled the boat closer with one foot before stepping aboard. Standing in the bow, he retrieved the can, and then took it with him to the back of the boat, where he unscrewed the gas-tank cap and checked the gauge before starting to pour the shimmering liquid in with the aid of a funnel. He poured just a little at a time, constantly checking the level, and when he’d finished, he carefully wiped the tank and the can and the funnel with a rag. He took just as much care in screwing on the caps and replacing the various items.

Each time he went out in his boat, he performed the same actions in precisely the same order. I knew that in a few moments he’d start the engine, then crouch down in the bow and loosen the moorings, and then, standing in front of the driving seat, he would back a few yards into the bay, sit down, rev up, and buzz out of the narrow sound between the islets in a wide arc. The compulsiveness of his actions had long since infected me. Each time I saw him get into his boat, I had to watch everything until he’d disappeared out of sight. I’d developed several similar traits out here, for instance I had to keep my shoulder moving the whole time when I was walking, it was as if my jacket never sat properly, just as my eyes sometimes began to blink in short bursts, and on my daily trips to the north end of the island, which were always at the same time each day, I had to follow particular routes and perform particular ceremonies on the way, although these compulsive acts didn’t trouble me greatly. As long as I obeyed them, they didn’t create problems. And why shouldn’t I obey them? A couple of times I’d walked past the lighthouse without touching it, and then taken another route to the headland, without achieving anything except a feeling of increasing nausea the farther I got, only to vomit at last over the black rock. Then I’d returned to the house, taken off my outer clothes, sat down on the sofa in the living room, waited a few minutes, and then begun the entire walk again. The longing to feel the wall against the palm of my hand was like an ache in my body as I mounted the slope. It was ridiculous, I knew it was ridiculous, but there was no avoiding it, my willpower was too weak, and I pressed my hand against the wall of the lighthouse, touched every other fence post on the way down as I blushed with shame and anger, waited until three waves had risen out by the submerged rock before continuing across the slabs as I carefully shut the following wave crests out of my field of vision, until I reached the headland and was finally outside the alien will’s jurisdiction.

If this was all it took to find peace, why on earth shouldn’t I do it? Resistance to these compulsive thoughts only shook me up unnecessarily. And who was I really resisting?

Perhaps the ridiculousness lay not in the compulsive thoughts, as I’d imagined, but in the resistance to them. Was resistance to compulsive thoughts in some way more “real” than compulsive thoughts? It could well be the other way round. It could well be that the compulsive thoughts gave expression to my real desires. That my very core had suddenly begun to express itself in this way. Observing the chaotic conditions that prevailed, it had introduced some simple measures to take control of the situation, a kind of mental confinement to barracks, which the strongest thoughts had been set to enforce, as a transitional phase, until the normal thoughts were again able to take care of themselves. For them, so little used to order and discipline, it felt like an encroachment, of course, and instead of submitting to it, which they felt was humiliating, they’d chosen to resist, spurred on by the notion of “freedom of thought” that they clung to. But nothing like “freedom of thought” has ever existed, it’s a laughable concept, just as all concepts of freedom are. Everything happens through necessity. The question is simply which necessity.

On the other side of the bay my neighbor was squatting in the bow loosening his moorings as the exhaust from the engine slowly drifted across the water. The hollow space under the quay gave the engine’s hum a moist sound that got drier and sharper when immediately afterward he backed out into the bay, plumped down on his seat, put the engine in gear, and streamed away toward the islands. This time I had to wait until the sound of the engine had died away completely before I was free to do as I liked. Then I opened the cupboard, took out some clean clothes, and went into the bathroom to the shower, stood under it until all the hot water was gone, dressed, and went down to the kitchen, put the coffeemaker on, spread some pieces of crispbread, filled a glass with water, and carried everything into the living room, where I sat down to eat, while I thought about what to do that day. Not that there was a lot of choice. After doing a few hours’ reading first thing, I usually went for a walk — usually to fish, but I also swam occasionally, even though the water out here was never more than fifty or sixty degrees — then I had dinner, and afterward I’d read into the evening, until I was tired enough to go to bed. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I took the boat to the council complex, where I cleaned offices in the admin building. That was it. That was the life I’d been living for the past twelve months. Only four other people lived out here, and our brief encounters when we bumped into one another was all the social life I led. From the outside it must look as if I was just marking time, and so I didn’t have any desire to talk to people I’d known before, and had got an unlisted number with the cell phone I’d bought in case of emergencies. The strange thing was that this life, in which I might not speak to anyone for days, was no less meaningful than the previous one I’d led. On the contrary. I’d never been more content. In the beginning, certainly, I’d been filled with an almost aggressive restlessness, a kind of hunger that nothing I saw or did could assuage, but after a few weeks it was as if the hurry in me were reduced, so that my thoughts could at last settle onto the things around me. And that was good enough. That was more than good enough. One morning I might see how the pale, quivering streak of light above the mountains on the mainland in the east slowly unfolded and got clearer and clearer as the earth turned, until the sun suddenly stood there and shone. Then the panes of the lighthouse sparkled, its cylindrical wall stood out white and sharp, the slabs below had a ruddy sheen against the cold blue of the sea, and all I could think about was how the sudden joy that the sight aroused in me could best be realized. Another morning I might wake up with the feeling that something had changed, open the curtains, and see how a thin layer of new snow had made the colors outside stand out with almost indecent clarity. The yellow of the grass, the green of the moss, the red of the boathouses, the blue of the tarpaulins. It was as if I’d come to a place where I hadn’t been for a long time, and the pale images of memory had to make way for the world as it is: sharp and realistic. One day the bay was teeming with fish, one day an otter had left a crisscross of tracks all over the island, one day a dead gull lay floating in the sea. One day an enormous flock of birds arrived on the island, they were there for several days, nervous and alert; even the smallest movement made them take wing: a cloud of birds then filled the air. One day a bleach bottle lay bobbing by the sea rock, one day a white plastic bag hung motionless in the water a few feet below the surface, one day a trimmed tree trunk knocked against the rock in the narrow cleft. One day the sea was as calm as a millpond, one day it was full of languid, bottomless breakers, one day of small, choppy waves as excitable as lemmings. Everything changed, but the change took place within the same limits, as if the seasons were a metronome, the days’ stanzas obeyed.

When I’d eaten, I leaned forward and peered at the sky in the west. It looked as if it were brightening a little; in a few places the grayness had broken into blue, as if an old layer of paint were showing through there. Time to get out, I thought, poured the rest of the coffee down the sink, and put the cup on the counter. Spinners, rod, rain gear, plastic bags, coffee, cigarettes, I thought. Is that the lot?

Just then, my cell phone rang in the bedroom. I stood still counting the rings. It stopped at eight. Then I repented. It couldn’t have been anyone but Mother, no one else had my number, but she usually rang every Sunday, and today was Thursday, so something must have happened.

Sure enough, Mom’s number was on the display. I’d really rather not have given her my number either, but I couldn’t, she’d have been mad with worry. Now she phoned once a week to find out how things were going, I talked a bit about what I’d read, as there wasn’t much else to tell her about from this end, she talked a bit about what had happened in the family in the meantime, and then she was happy and we hung up.

I took the cell into the living room, where the reception was better, and rang her number.

“Hello, Ingrid here,” she said.

“Hi, Mom, it’s Henrik. You phoned me. Was it something important?”

“No, I was just thinking about you, and wanted to hear how things were going.”

“Thinking about me,” I said. “So, what were you thinking?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said. “How are things going out there?”

“Fine,” I said. “It’s perfect fishing weather. I was just going out when you rang.”

“I won’t keep you then,” she said.

“No, no, it doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’ve got plenty of time.”

My young neighbor’s boat came planing into the sound between the two small islands.

“What are you doing at home anyway?” I asked. “Are you ill?”

I knew exactly how he’d slacken off speed and closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t have to watch.

“It is Saturday today,” she said.

“Saturday?” I said. “But I was doing my cleaning yesterday. . oh, of course, it was Friday yesterday!”

When I opened my eyes again, he was standing in front of the seat, as I anticipated, with one hand on the wheel and the other on the throttle as the boat slowly nosed the final stretch to the quay.

I heard her smiling at me on the other end.

“Well, say what you were thinking,” I said.

“It wasn’t anything,” she said. “Really, nothing. I just wondered if anything had happened.”

“Happened? In what way?”

“I said it was nothing.”

“A kind of omen?” I said.

She laughed. But I knew that was exactly what it was.

“No, no. Not an omen, Henrik.”

“I know you,” I said. “You saw an omen. And you rang to check up if there was anything in it. You weren’t going to chance ignoring it, because it might be true, eh? Isn’t that what happened?”

“Well, perhaps,” she said.

Again I heard her smiling. It made me happy.

“Have you heard from Klaus?” I asked.

“Not in the past few days,” she said. “But they’re coming early next week.”

“You told me that.”

“It’ll be lovely,” she said.

On the other side of the bay my neighbor was lying on his stomach on the bow fishing for the mooring rope with a gaff hook. When he’d gotten hold of it, he tied it to the bow, placed the gaff hook under the seat, and went aft to check that the mooring was taut enough.

“Give them my love,” I said.

“I will,” she said. “And I hope all goes well with you in the meantime.”

“You, too,” I said. “Bye for now.”

I lowered the phone and heard a faint bye as it cut off. Outside my neighbor was lifting two bags of shopping onto the quay, followed by the gasoline can, before starting to roll out the blue cover. My rules were just as strict about arrival as departure, so I just had to stand there and watch him finish up. When the last loop was fastened, he balanced along the gunwale as he steadied himself with one hand on the quay, climbed the ladder, picked up the bags and the gas can, and began to walk home. Not so long before this had been the cutoff point for my attention; now I had to maintain it all the way until he closed the house door behind him. Like some animal spellbound by a sudden light, I stood there staring at him. He stopped in front of the woodshed, pushed the door open with his foot, and put the gas can inside, continued up the garden path, into the yard, gathered the bags in one hand, opened the door, and disappeared into the house. Relieved, I went out into the hall to put on my rain gear. The smell of sleep forced its way down from the bedroom, and I felt a sudden yearning for the outdoors in my breast. But I didn’t hurry. I fetched my fishing rod and the box of spinners from the cellar, opened it, untangled the hooks, and laid the spinners in their respective compartments, sorted by size, and as always the sight of them aroused a childish pleasure in me, both because of their colors, which were beautiful, and their shapes, which in their imitation of fishes’ bodies had something toylike and almost movingly harmless about them. Then I washed the congealed fish blood off my knife, dried it, tested the blade with my thumb, took the steel out of the drawer and sharpened it a bit, put it in its sheath, and placed it in my pack along with the thermos, rain pants, and cell phone, before buttoning the cuffs of my waterproof jacket tight about my wrists and pulling the zip up to my neck. I put on a pair of woolen socks, pushed my feet into my boots, laced them up tightly, opened the door, and went out.

Just at that moment two gulls took off from the steps. They were so close I could have touched them. Their eyes looked rigidly straight ahead, seemingly independent of their bodies’ movements as they beat their wings and half-turned in the air until they’d gained sufficient height to be able to sail across the narrow bay and settle on the gables of one of the boathouses.

They had strewn garbage all over the steps. Coffee grounds, orange peel, spaghetti, bread crusts, chicken bones, bits of fish and skin, potato peelings, tea leaves, cigarette butts. The wind must have tipped over the can in the night, I thought, and then they’d pecked holes in the bags and pulled out the contents.

Across the bay one of them raised its head and screamed. The cry, which on clear days would have carried far out to sea, sounded strangely thin and frail in the mist. I wondered if the gull noticed. That it couldn’t quite manage the thing today. Or perhaps they weren’t bothered by such minor details on a day like this? At last they’d found where that alluring stink of decomposition came from. They smelled it every day, a deeper vibration in the air, something wet and wonderful that drove them to distraction: where did it come from? They suspected the black can with the hard lid, but hadn’t been certain until this morning, when to their great surprise they found it lying there overturned and open.

I gathered up the garbage in my hands, fetched a new bag from the kitchen, filled it up, went down to the sea rocks at the back of the house and emptied the contents into the water. There was no refuse collection out here, so organic rubbish went straight into the sea, and the rest was burned. Both these operations gave me deep satisfaction. I liked seeing the rubbish sinking through the clear water, where it might make the bottom resemble one of those disaster areas with the remnants of clothing, aircraft seats, and passengers strewn about the terrain: a chicken bone high up in a tangle of seaweed, a peach pit at the bottom of a crevice, bits of potato peel on the sand by the rock wall, a shredded coffee filter caught up in a belt of sea wrack. And I liked sitting on the knoll and watching the flames at work, their canine twisting hither and thither in the wind, the flakes of ash whirled up by the hot air, the beautiful blue tinge that glowed over melting plastic.

As I stood there looking into the inlet, the sound of an engine came from somewhere. The mist and the many channels between the little islands at first made it impossible to pinpoint, like a word you have on the tip of your tongue, it’s there, you know it, but still it won’t be cornered, until a dark shadow rounding the headland at the end of the holm brought the uncertainty to an end. It was an inflatable. In it sat two men, both in the stern, their bodies leaning into the wind. One steered, the other held what looked like a map in his hands. Although the boat passed within a few yards of the rock I was on, they didn’t notice me. It swung round the headland in a gentle curve and disappeared from sight, but from the sound of the engine I could tell it was bound for the harbor. I knew that they had nothing to do with me, but still I was troubled by their proximity, and as I went back to the house I made certain to keep out of sight. From the corner of the house I saw the outboard motor switched off and tipped up as the boat’s momentum covered the final stretch to the end of the bay and a little way up the muddy beach. I thought they might be from the lighthouse service, but when they’d tied a loose knot round the door handle of the boathouse, as a precaution against rising water, they began to walk in the opposite direction to the lighthouse, over to the other side of the island, where as far as I knew there was nothing for the lighthouse service to maintain. I considered following them to find out what they were doing, but quickly brushed the thought aside; no matter where they were from, their presence had nothing to do with me. Instead, I picked up my fishing rod and began to walk along the road, took a run at the fence that kept the island’s two remaining sheep out, and cleared it, smelled the breath of salt and rot as I passed the narrow cleft that filled with water when the tide rose, but that now lay empty and shone viscera-like with kelp and sea grass and bunches of mussels, climbed up the little knoll, and followed the path up the hill to the lighthouse, where I stopped and lit a cigarette with my back propped up against the edge of the steps and my gaze on the harbor, which, in its perfect immobility, weather-beaten and waterlogged, looked as if it were part of the island’s vegetation.

The house I rented lay on the end of a narrow spit of land, separated from the other houses by a shallow bay, which in turn was sheltered from the sea by a low rampart of a mountain. From there the ground rose in a grass-covered slope to the island’s highest point, where the lighthouse stood. Although not a single bush or tree grew there, only grass and moss, it appeared fertile compared with the ground on the other side of the lighthouse, where the rock, stretching seaward for several hundred yards after forming a steep descent down a cliff-like escarpment, was so low-lying that the sea flooded it during storms, and made it look more like a skerry than anything: bare, barren, bereft of vegetation.

Right up until the sixties more than forty people lived out here. Now only four remained, and because the purely practical side of life on the island was so complicated, without a shop, post office, doctor’s office, school, or refuse collection, it could be only for sentimental reasons that they stayed on, and that placed them high in my estimation, especially as sentimentality, which is usually considered to be a weak emotion, displayed itself in them in the form of unwavering resolution.

Or perhaps this appreciation was no more than a type of self-defense, as my own grounds for moving out here were at least indirectly sentimental: from my very earliest childhood I’d heard tell of the Utøy Islands, my great-grandfather had grown up here, and despite not knowing his name or what he looked like, it was enough to cause a vague sense of belonging to grow in me, and for some reason this was what I clung to when events the previous year had forced me to break with the life I’d been living. I’d done something terrible, and the terribleness had become a part of me; somber and shady it always lurked in my consciousness, every glance I met, every conversation I had, even if it was only with a supermarket cashier, led my thoughts back to what I’d done and aroused the same feelings each time: baseness, sordidness, blackness. Intellectually I could both understand and explain what I’d done, but in this the power of thought was too insignificant, as it is in all decisive questions, and thrown back on my emotions, I was cast into a hopelessness so pervasive that my days were spent doing nothing but enduring. I slept, I ate, I watched television. Each time a car slowed down outside, I turned off the light and stood by the window to see if they were coming to me, each time the phone rang, it was as if fear broke out within me, in a matter of seconds it had filled me like a vessel, and only an enormous effort of will steeled me to lift the receiver and answer, even though I knew how small the chances were of them finding me there.

This went on for several months. When I finally did manage to get out and rent a house on Sandholmen, as it was called, it was September. Up the fjord the boat following the landscape had begun to yellow, the evenings came early, and when I walked down the gangplank with my two suitcases onto the quay of the tiny fishing hamlet where the landlord was to meet me, the lights from the houses on the islands all around shone like small stars in the thick darkness.

I put the suitcases down and lit a cigarette, let my eyes wander over the few figures on the quay, and decided it must be the eldest of them who was waiting for me. At all events he glanced in my direction several times. I met his gaze and raised my eyebrows expectantly. It was enough to bring him over.

“Hello,” I said. “Are you the house owner?”

“That’s right,” he said. “Egil Leirvik.”

We shook hands. Behind us the thump of the boat’s engines ceased, and the light in the saloon was turned off.

“My boat’s just over here,” he said. “It’s late, so we’d better get going.”

He picked up one of the suitcases and began to walk across the quay. I turned to the boat, which was now in complete darkness apart from the green, phosphorescing lights of the instrument panel in the wheelhouse, chucked my cigarette into the sea between the hull and the quay, took a deep breath and felt how the tang of diesel, seawater, and fog sent a surge of delight through my breast.

A few minutes later I was aboard his fishing boat leaning my elbow on the cabin roof, staring out at the many channels that intersected the small islands. Occasionally we passed a house, spaces like great aquariums of light in the darkness, and I had brief glimpses of how people lived, their lamps, flowerpots, leather sofas, and television screens. Below each house was a jetty and a boathouse and a couple of boats of different sizes, which tugged at their mooring ropes when the waves from our wake reached the land. The old man at my side stood as if he were alone, occasionally turning the metal wheel attached to the wall in front of him, always with his eyes fixed straight ahead, and even though his silence struck me as unnatural, there was something in his bearing that told me it wasn’t necessary to say anything.

On both sides of the inlet the ground was gradually becoming lower and sharper. When we passed the last headland and got out into open water, the boat began to pitch. I noticed several times that his gaze turned to me, but each time, like an animal, he made sure he didn’t make direct eye contact, and I knew that my presence worried him.

I wiped my hand across the cabin roof and gathered the droplets into a little pool under my fingers.

“My grandfather helped to build the chapel out here,” I said. “And the quayside.”

He gave me the quickest of glances.

“Aha,” he said.

“That must have been sometime toward the end of the twenties,” I said. “His father was a builder. Many of the houses they built are still standing.”

He said nothing to this.

“But then he turned to fishing when his father died,” I went on. “Out here, too. Herring.”

Not a line of his features betrayed what he was thinking. He stood there impregnable with one hand on the wheel and the other on the cabin roof and his gaze fixed on what was ahead, where the sea lay heavy beneath the black sky. Each time the bows took a wave badly the water came down with a splash on the cabin roof, and a light shower of sea spray filled the air around us. A few hundred yards ahead a light blinked regularly in the darkness. Then a low island appeared through the blackness, and the old man raised his hand.

“Sandholmen’s behind that,” he said.

“Is it?” I said.

He altered course, and the next wave lifted the propeller out of the water, and the engine noise suddenly altered. It was as if it were barking like a dog, I thought. Shortly after, we glided past the headland and entered a calm bay, faintly illuminated by the reflection of the lights on the quayside. Nearest us were five boathouses side by side, on the slope behind were a few houses, threaded by a narrow gravel road that continued into the darkness along the bay, where it was regularly lit up by a shaft of light from the blinking lighthouse on top of the island, and this also revealed the undulating terrain of the hillside: rocks, moss, grass, and the occasional clump of heather.

A small dog was barking furiously on the edge of the quay as we came sailing in. It was tied up, and kept straining forward the whole time.

He moored just beneath it, turned off the engine, and motioned me to go ashore. I glanced up at the frenzied animal.

“He’s as gentle as a lamb,” he said smiling. “He’s just pleased to see us.”

I gripped the slippery ladder and clambered up onto the quay, stepped quickly a couple of paces to the side to get out of range of the dog, turned, and took the suitcases he handed up.

“There’s a wheelbarrow in that shed there,” he said. “Here.”

He brought out a flashlight from the pocket of his insulated coveralls and gave it to me. As I opened the door, I sensed that he was kneeling in front of the dog behind me. I took a few steps in and shone the light around the place. A thick layer of dust coated the planks and the many objects inside, except for a central area near the door, where traffic was obviously heavy enough to prevent it settling. It looked like snow, I thought. Snow from the sky of the dead. Along one wall, between stacks of fish crates and crab baskets, old oilskins and waterproof trousers were suspended from nails, along with coveralls and life jackets. The other wall was covered with various tools, most of them rusty. Scythes, saws, wrenches, screwdrivers, box wrenches, pliers, hammers. An outboard motor, also rusty, was clamped to a sawhorse in the corner, next to it some milk churns, a lawn mower, and a wheelbarrow with its handles propped against the wall. I wheeled it out of the shed and took it to the quay, we each put a suitcase into it, I returned the flashlight. He shone the beam inland and set off walking. Without a word we followed the road into the darkness. The swish of the sea lay like a veil over the landscape, and made the rustle of rain gear and the sound of the wheel running over gravel extraordinarily clear. Here and there parts of the road had subsided, and when we’d passed the row of houses, it became narrower and gradually overgrown too, until the final stretch was no more than a path. Apart from the dockside, which was lit up, it was impossible to see what the country around us looked like. But I could feel it. Again that surge of joy within me: at last I’d be alone.

The house was just as it had been when it was left. All the furniture and lamps, all the crockery and bed linen was from the seventies. The carpet in the living room was yellow, the sofa was upholstered in brown with orange stripes, the chairs were leather, the cupboards and tables teak. He showed me where the wood was, explained how the water pump worked, opened the drawer of towels and bedclothes in the chest of drawers in the bedroom, pointed out his own house on the other side of the bay. If there was anything I needed to know, I was just to knock.

I thanked him and shook his hand. Halfway down the steps he turned and glanced up at me.

“Your grandfather,” he said. “What was his name?”

“Olav Hellevik,” I said.

“No,” he said. “I don’t recognize the name.”

The expectation that in some way I should form a bond with this landscape, simply because the same blood that existed out here for several generations also ran in my veins, was refuted even as I climbed to the lighthouse the next morning, and saw the island as it was for the first time. Bathed in the shadowless light from a sharp, white sky, it lay at my feet, desolate and windswept, with no room for any notions apart from those the instant revealed. No matter how long I stood staring down at the cluster of homes and boathouses in the bay, I couldn’t conjure up the life that once must have thronged the place. No fleet of fishing boats, with its nineteenth-century tangle of masts and hulls, sails and cordage, appeared to my inner eye, no homespun-clad men rolled barrels of herring in and out of the sheds, no women in skirts came carrying water from the well or milk from the cow barn, no children played among the rocks, no cows stood in the stalls, no flocks of sheep moved tinkling up the hill. The houses lay there like desiccated insects, bereft of the life and meaning that had once flowed through them. Even so, the sight of the island filled me with pleasure that morning. It was just such a place as this that I’d longed for. A place that lay beyond everything, a place that lacked all relevance, a place society would never turn its attention toward. A place with no future. That was what I’d longed for. And now I was there.

But after the transport of the first few hours, hopelessness descended again. The next few days I trudged around the island with head bowed, blind to everything but my own despair, and so powerful were these emotions that they even encompassed the landscape as well: when I sat on the sea rocks in the evening and stared at the sunset in the west, it was as if this, too, were merely one of my thoughts. That the sun was going down inside me. That it was my gleaming reflection the sea washed over. Even the starry sky, which was clearer here than anywhere I’d ever been, was no longer a thing out there, that, too, I’d turned into myself. Perhaps this all sounds rather grand, as if by containing the whole world I’d deified myself, but the opposite was the case; the condition stripped everything of its beauty, because what I saw became as inferior and senseless as I was myself. The sun became a miniature sun, the sea a miniature sea, the sky a miniature sky. I had fled into myself, that was what had happened. The advantage of this strategy was that nothing out there could affect me anymore, the drawback was that it all lost its meaning. And as the need for meaning is absolute, I had to seek it elsewhere. This is the only way I can explain the shameful self-idolization that occurred during these years. I was a miserable human being, but precisely by insisting on this wretchedness, I gave myself and my life some meaning. That powerful sense of shame must be seen in this light. Sense of shame was a mechanism whose highly receptive sensors picked up everything — even the tiniest thing — that concerned me. These small things were then put through a kind of amplifier and magnified into events of huge proportions, in order to assure me that everything concerning me was of great, if not huge, significance. This meant that I inhabited a kind of dislocated, Gothic pseudoreality, where instead of relating to the world, with its pure colors and clear shapes, I related to grotesque and artificially animated shadow figures of myself in it, which were forever rising up and shrinking on the walls within me. Such a mock reality is, however, dependent on a continual supply of new events in order to sustain it, I realized. Shame is a social mechanism, it requires a tight set of relationships to function, without that it withers, and this was exactly what happened after a few weeks on the island. The sun of today pushed the shadows of yesterday further and further back, it’s the only way I can describe it, because it was as if more and more light came into my life, while at the same time I moved further and further toward the front of my consciousness, until one day I stood right out on the edge and stared out, filled with an enormous ecstasy: I was here! I could see this! It took less and less to kindle the joy of life in me. The sight of a heron slowly taking to the wing from a beacon at dusk, for example, the faint swish of its wings when shortly afterward it flies over my head, like the sound of a sail as the wind dies, the strangely exotic cry it makes, the thought of how primitive it seems, as if it’s from another time, a darker and more unfinished one than our own. The sight one afternoon of an otter sliding down a snowbank on its belly, something it finds so amusing that, once it’s shaken the snow off itself, it immediately runs up and does it again. The silence in the grassy hollows in the middle of the island on these high, bright summer days, the sensation then of being on a planet that had managed to come into existence, the almost insane beauty of the colors: the sky’s blue, the sun’s yellow, the algae pool’s green. The way the bumblebees bowed their forelegs when they flew past me low, not unlike a squirrel or a begging dog perhaps, their shimmering wings. The sound of drops falling from a gutter and onto the steps outside the door after a shower, slower and slower, like the ticking of a cooling engine. Every day brought small gifts like these. And I accepted them with gladness.

What I was most pleased about, though, was that my entire former existence seemed as if blown away. When the constant intercourse with others no longer interposed itself between me and the world, I could evaluate my life in terms that weren’t sullied by emotion, and in that way arrive at something solid. And then I understood that the human was just what I wanted to get away from. Not other people as such, but that whole flora of feelings that welled up in me when I was with them. Emotions were what had made me so soft and indistinct, so weak and pliant, so blushingly young girlish, they were to blame for all the misery in my life. Ever since I was small and could cry and cry over the smallest thing, sensitivity had got in my way. All that damned talk of mine, when I never quite knew where to draw the line, and therefore let it flow out in all directions, all that damned desire to make everyone happy, when I would go to any length to be liked, as if my character were a rubber band, all those damned humiliations I’d so willingly subjected myself to, all those doglike evasions and all that spineless fawning and ass-licking I’d spent years at, where had it gotten me?

I’d been so deeply mired in an emotional morass of shame and contempt, self-pity and small, piss-tepid streams of pleasure, that I’d never even suspected just how ignominious this existence was. I saw the world from within it, that was why it appeared so small and insignificant, while I, enveloped in the gloom of my thoughts, had turned into something mushroomy, something soft and slimy that had puffed up grotesquely. I was everything; the world was nothing. Of course this didn’t mean that I liked myself, on the contrary, I was filled with hate for myself and everything about me, but what was this hate, though, other than a new way of embracing myself? Because there was a satisfaction in it, oddly enough. A kind of sweetness. During that first week on the island, despair could drive me out into the evening darkness, where nothing had anything to do with me now, cold and inhospitable, the landscape thrust me away from it, I was totally alone and jogged furiously up the grassy hill as my eyes gradually accustomed themselves to the darkness. The worst thing wasn’t that I found myself out here on my own, nor that I’d wrung the last few drops of meaning out of my existence, the worst thing was that I wasn’t able to conceive of another life. Either I had to come to terms with it, or I had to bring it to a conclusion. The latter thought awakened something resembling joy inside me. It would be so easy. But my pleasure was nothing more than a species of my childhood’s self-pity, and when I realized that, already lulled by its sweet warmth, something contemptible came over that thought as well. Not even my despondency had any depth. I wasn’t standing on the edge of an abyss, I was standing before yet another argument: shall I take my own life to prove to myself that my despair is genuine? What sort of ludicrous suicide would that be? And what kind of epitaph would it spawn?

HENRIK VANKEL

1970–1998

DIED TO PROVE TO HIMSELF

THAT HIS FEELINGS WERE GENUINE

I got no further. As I went on across the island, as the breakers were pounded to whiteness against the mountain beneath me and the light from the lighthouse swept soundlessly through the darkness, I knew that it would never happen, for no matter how meaningless my life was, no matter how despicable I might seem in the eyes of others, I would never give up, but would always cling to the only thing inside myself that I really could depend on when all else failed. Because I was managing, I was staying afloat, I was happy with myself.

Wasn’t I?

Yes, I was. Not even the most minute examination of my life could shake the core inside me: will. It was unquenchable. Sometimes, when I found myself in one of these situations where there was complete silence around me, I thought that others could hear it too. A quiet, continuous hum of something that just burned and burned.

I flicked my cigarette down the hill, picked up my fishing rod, and continued down. On clear days you could see the clusters of islands and holms over toward the mountain chain in the east, but now the mist closed all that off. It was as if the sea itself had risen, I thought, and finally, diluted with air, had made its claim on the landscape it had coveted for so long. In the flat rocks below me the surplus water, which had filled up the many pools during the night, trickled down cracks and grooves in the ragged rock. The barrenness of the surroundings together with the mist gave the colors at the bottom of these pools a peculiar intensity: in one place rust red, another shining green, another urine yellow with salty white stains, and above them all hovered a myriad of insects, as small and dry as flower spores.

I crouched and carefully let myself down the ten feet to the shelf-like ledge from where I normally fished, took off my pack, got out the reel, assembled the rod and attached a spinner to the swivel, raised the rod above my head, and cast, looking out the whole time. The sight of the sea filled me with an elated, almost feverish feeling of well-being. Along the entire western side of the island the breakers beat against the skerries, spuming white shards of water that crashed slowly through the air. The waves in the sound before me were faster, with a craquelure of foam and fizzing eddies as they struck land. Each time they receded they left the kelp-covered rock bare, and the hissing sound made it seem as though it had come up to breathe for a brief moment before again diving into the breakers. Then the spinner came speeding through the water. It clinked against the rock beneath me, I reeled it fully in and cast again, this time in the other direction, without getting a bite. Although I was perfectly happy, I changed spinners, mainly because it made me feel that I knew what I was doing.

I only noticed the ship when I turned to put the spinner in my pack. The holm behind which it lay hid almost the entire hull. Only the radar and the top part of the bridge were visible.

So that was where the inflatable had come from, I thought. A warship on exercises. It was nothing to worry about, but there was something in the ship’s presence that wasn’t good.

No, not good.

I cast a few times, but the thought of the ship lying there ruined the serenity that fishing normally gave, and after a while I decided to go across to the other side of the island, where hopefully I’d be able to fish undisturbed.

I packed up and moved off. At the top of a small hummock I turned and looked back at the ship. There wasn’t a soul to be seen onboard. Perhaps it was the lack of people, perhaps it was its shining gray color, perhaps it was the numbers painted on the hull. But I couldn’t fish with it near.

I couldn’t even on the other side of the spit of land, with a fifteen-foot-high wall of rock behind me. I gathered my equipment together again and walked along the shore all the way to the southern side.

There I was comfortable.

I was very fond of fishing. For a few hours there was nothing but the weight of the rod in my hands, the droplets of salt water that now and then caught my face, the whirring sound of the reel, the sight of the mountains in the east, their appearance altering hour by hour, according to the light that fell on them, the feeling the open country gave of being closer to the sky. All the same, I was an abysmal fisherman. My line was always getting tangled, and after a lot of bother it usually ended with me having to cut it loose; the spinner was forever catching on the bottom, and after hauling on the line from every possible direction, I frequently had to employ the same tactic there. The hooks caught in my hands, which were full of little cuts and grazes; I had no control over my casts, which were just as likely to end up on the knoll to my left or the rocks behind me as in the sea in front, and every once in a while these sudden movements would make me overbalance and slip on the treacherous sea rocks. In the beginning this clumsiness had made me uncomfortable; with burning cheeks I would look around all the time to check that no one was watching me, and when I packed up my things and started back, it felt as if I’d just come out of a house full of loud and clamorous people. But the lantern of loneliness is a strong and bright one, and gradually these shadows, too, gave way before it. The only unpleasantness that then remained was killing the fish I hauled up. I had never managed to learn how to break their necks, and instead had to bang their heads on the rocks until no signs of life remained, which for some reason I grew less and less inclined to do the longer I lived out there. At the same time I disliked my own increasing squeamishness, there was something pathetic in having scruples about killing a fish, and this made me bang their heads even more violently against the rocks.

Oh, what a terrible business it was. The fishes’ bodies writhing in my grasp, the blood running down over their eyes when their soft heads struck the rock, the spasms that could drag on for hours afterward. Even with their heads cut off and their entrails cleaned out, their muscles could tense and their tails thrash. Sometimes I would feel it against my back as I walked home in the twilight, the dead fish leaping in my pack, and once it had made me lose control; furiously I’d yanked them out of the bag they were in and thrown them out to sea one by one, where they lay floating on the surface, dead and still, until the ever-vigilant gulls arrived a few minutes later and turned the quiet evening scene into a cacophony of ugly cries and swirling feathered bodies. It was at moments like these that isolation could be a burden, because where could I take my frustration and anxiety? There was nothing that could assuage it, whether I sat in my living room or went for a walk up to the lighthouse, it remained the same, and sometimes even grew in intensity, so that I would end up crying in bed, unable to prevent myself, I just cried and cried. It happened regularly, but not that often, perhaps once a week, and I thought of it as a kind of equalization, enabling the inner world to empty itself into the outer one, and reestablish the balance between them: the day after such an attack I always felt calm and relaxed, somehow closer to my surroundings, as if crying were a sort of way of regrouping the elements of consciousness, where the internal sludge, which had settled into great middens between my ego and the impressions from my surroundings, was sluiced away, so that my ego could again reach right to the edge of the world. There the shifts in sky and sea were more important than those of the emotions, and if a memory were awakened and rose up within me, it instantly dissolved in the majesty of the present moment, and in that way was placed in its rightful context: they were nothing more than a few impulses in a brain, an electrical phenomenon in an organic body, and seen in that perspective might as well have belonged to one of the many birds that lived out here.

I stood there for half an hour before I got a bite, and another half hour before I caught a fish. It was small and orangey brown and had a round mouth, and I chucked it back in. Then, just as I took a step back and raised the rod over my head again, I suddenly remembered my dream of the previous night. Without thinking about it, I completed the cast and followed the spinner’s trajectory through the air with my eyes as I tried to fix the images from my dream in my mind. I’d been climbing up a mountainside, my fingers were numb, suddenly I’d lost my grip and fallen backward, struck my head against the rock, and lay there. I knew that I was unconscious, I couldn’t move my body, I was imprisoned within myself and my own blackness. After a time some people had come and lifted me up. And it was then, as I hung between them, that he had risen inside me. It was the sound of his terrified voice that had died out in the room as I awoke.

A little of the same fear rushed through me, like a fire suddenly coming to life again long after the flames have been extinguished, but then a sound made me turn my head, and when a second later the express boat passed through the little islands and into the sound, the memory of my dream left me as quickly as it had come. The white hull, paper-sharp against the soft gray of the sea and the sky, looked as if it were stationary from a distance, framed by the plunging mountainsides, but this tableau-like quality dissipated as the boat approached and the center of attention moved from the whole to the individual details, like the rock breaking into pieces as the sledgehammer strikes. The windshield wipers waved from side to side on the bridge, the radar swiveled on the roof, the young ticket collector came down the deck with a mailbag in his hand. I raised my arm in greeting, and he returned it. Just then the line went taut, and as the wash from the boat struck the rocks beneath me, I let the line run out, watched it loop on the surface, and realized that the spinner had caught on the bottom. I reeled in the slack and tried to get it loose by jerking the rod, without success, it was too firmly embedded. Only when I put the rod down and began to haul in with my hands did it come free. But not with a start, as I’d expected, the weight remained even though I was pulling it nearer. It was a fish, and it must be a large one. I picked up my rod and stood on the very edge of the knoll. The rod bent, I paid out more line, the fish moved away parallel to the land, I followed it a few paces, reeled in, and brought it several feet closer before the resistance became too great and I had to let it out again. This was repeated several times. Then suddenly it stopped fighting. I reeled in as fast as I could, my gaze fixed on the surface all the while, and caught sight of it a few seconds later, a dark, gliding shadow in the greenish water. I put down the rod and hauled in the line with my hands. It slipped into the seaweed of the rocks below me without a struggle.

For God’s sake.

It was enormous. I got the gaff hook out of my pack, crouched down, and hit it as hard as I could on its side. Just as I was starting to pull it up, it began to thrash its tail. In my confusion I threw the whole lot away from me, gaff hook and all. It landed on the rock with a slap and lay writhing this way and that while I stood there watching. The gaff hook clattered against the rock with each movement it made. The sight of its gray green back, white gills, yellow eyes, and gaping mouth filled me with loathing. Only after a few minutes, when it had lain still for some time, did I bend down toward it. I saw that the hook was embedded in the corner of its mouth, and held its neck with one hand while I tried to extricate it with the other. Immediately it began to jump once more. I withstood the desire to get up again, but instead pressed it even harder against the rock while I tugged at the hook with all my might, but although the corner of its mouth fractured, I couldn’t get it out, the angle was wrong, and when I stood up, I thought it would be better to kill it first. But it was too big for me to swing against a rock effectively. Perhaps it would be best just to let it lie there until it died of its own accord? I could have a smoke in the meantime.

I washed my hands in the water, dried them on my trousers, and carried my pack to the top of the headland, where, using my jacket as a groundsheet, I sat on the rocks, got out my thermos, poured out a cup, and lit a cigarette. In the inlet below me the express boat came back into view. I followed it with my eyes until it disappeared behind the holm that hid the channel leading to the island with the filleting factory and the shop. From there it took an hour to reach the administrative center on the mainland, which itself was another four hours by boat from Bergen.

I went down half an hour later. The fish had to be lying quite still by now. I yanked out the gaff hook, clutched the great slippery neck, and carried it down to a small pool. I pulled my knife out of its sheath and began to cut off its head.

Suddenly it struck out hard with its tail, and I threw it away from me again.

It was hopeless.

What was wrong with me? Couldn’t I even kill a bloody fish?

I grabbed it, and cut as hard as I could. It continued to writhe and I continued to cut. Even with its head completely off, half-submerged, and staring with its idiotic eyes, spasms passed through its body. Nevertheless I stuffed it in a plastic bag, which only half covered it, thrust it into my pack, and began to walk home with my rod in hand and the pack with the fish tail pointing skyward on my back. When I got into the kitchen, I put it in the sink and began to gut it. It must have been an hour since I’d landed it, and fifteen minutes since it had been decapitated, but its tail thrashed against the sink in no less an outraged manner as I opened its belly. I scraped out its entrails, they slipped between my fingers, and I felt nauseated as I threw them into the water below the house, where the gulls turned up half a minute later, with their thrashing wings and piercing wails.

Once I’d put the fish in the freezer in the cellar, I had a shower, changed, fried some potatoes and a couple of sausages and an egg, and ate in front of the living room window. Afterward, I tried to sleep on the sofa, but couldn’t, and I went up to my bedroom to fetch a book from the pile in the corner behind the door. I stood there for at least ten minutes with my eyes scanning the titles. Discourse Concerning the True Notion of the Lord’s Supper. . Inside the Third Reich. . Miracles: Works Above and Contrary to Nature. . Essays on the Theory of the Earth. . Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Immortality. . Eight Lectures on Geology. . Diary of the Voyage of HMS Beagle. . Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley. . It was a case of finding something rigorous. If there was one thing I’d learned, it was that there was no better place to turn than the sober, serene world of language when you were disturbed and filled with contempt for yourself. To feel that first sentence settling like a cool hand on your brow.

Not dull, but rigorous, not dull, but rigorous. The words sang inside me.

The book I took down with me was Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry, which I’d begun several times but never got through, and wouldn’t get through this time either.

I read for a couple of hours. Then I stood in the cellar for a while looking out the window, the smell had good associations and I could see the fog part and the islands’ landward municipal center, with its red and blue and yellow houses, stand out against the blue black of the sky and the glowing green of the moss.

Something was wrong. Something was so wrong that I didn’t know which way to turn.

I stood there for a long time with the phone in my hand.

For a few intense minutes I masturbated over the bathroom sink. A kind of tranquillity came over me when I’d finished, I sank down onto the cold bathroom floor and lay stretched out there for a while, before I undressed, showered and changed, took a walk to the pier, stood looking down into the clear, green water, where things that resembled trees, certainly five feet high and quite motionless, grew.

I realized I was about to start crying, and walked back, into the living room, where I lay down on the sofa. By then the crying was far away again. Fortunately I fell asleep after a few minutes.

When I awoke, it had begun to rain. I went into the kitchen, cut a few slices of bread on the counter and got something to spread on it, took a glass of water, and sat down at the table. Luckily the mood from before my nap had lifted. It seemed overwrought now.

I ate the slices of bread, drank the water.

Outside the window the mountain and the grass glistened with moisture. The two sheep stood immobile under a bush, and I smiled to myself, they seemed so inestimably sad as they stared vacuously ahead of them with their fleeces hanging in wet skeins from their sides. I tapped out a cigarette from the pack and opened the window. The sudden movement caused both sheep to look up at me. Simultaneously a small cloud of garden birds rose from the bush above them. After a few moments’ flapping they settled down on the wire that looped gently from the house wall to a pole on the rise. Not without pleasure I lit the cigarette as I watched them: the soft, almost inaudible crackling as the tobacco was lit, the smoke that seeped down to my lungs and drifted into the tiny airways. How the poisonous materials were deposited and slowly, slowly broke the organ down. Inside me, now.

The thought led to another related one, and I felt a rush of anticipation in my breast, a kind of nervousness. I raised the glass to my lips and emptied the contents in one gulp. Then rose and smashed it in one short blow against the counter. I took the biggest splinter up to the bathroom, where I pulled off my T-shirt and stood in front of the mirror. I could have used a knife, but there is something repugnant about that, the edge slips into the skin without resistance, the pain is sharp, as if something is set in motion inside me, impossible to reach, impossible to get hold of. But glass demands force, and its pain is more even, more obvious.

Yes: a kind of nervousness.

I rested the point of the glass on the skin above my collarbone, hard, until it had dug in and I could pull it down my chest. I waited until droplets of blood began to appear, then I made a new cut, next to the first one, and then another.

There was a resistance in the pain that I liked, it had to be overcome, time after time, and there was a rhythm, which gradually possessed me. Pressing the glass into ever more places, drawing new marks, just letting the blood run and mix, rising above the pain, pressing the glass in, keeping the pressure and pulling it down, letting the blood run, rising above the pain.

When I got to the area around my nipples, I had a rest, leaned forward and dashed my face with cold water, met my own eyes in the mirror. The muscles made it harder, they moved under the pressure from the splinter, sometimes it forced me to close my eyes. It was a matter of willpower. But soon it was done, soon I could make a start on my arms, they were firmer, they were simpler.

What had in the beginning been clearly distinct lines of pain gradually coalesced into one single, burning pain. I looked at my chest in the mirror and tried to find any places where my work had been poor, where I hadn’t pressed hard enough, so that the skin was merely grazed, or places where there were areas of skin that hadn’t been cut. But at last there was nothing more to do, and I went into the bedroom pressing a towel to my chest to suck up the blood. Outside, the rain was still pouring down. I crouched by my suitcase and took out a clean T-shirt. For I while I just stood there, in the middle of the room, not quite knowing what to do. Then I went over to the window, opened it, and glanced over toward the mountains in the east. The thick, gray cloud layer had a hint of blue in it, it gave it a metallic look, which the distant flashes of lightning emphasized. The rain drifted with the wind, struck my face, blew into the room. I was cold, but I remained where I was, looking down into the bay, at the boats rocking at their moorings, at their white, shiny plastic. The water just sloshing onto the planks of the quay, completely transparent. The dark red walls of the sheds, the pale green grass on the slope behind, the blue black sky. The surface of the sea that curved toward the horizon and seemed to support the shimmering light. The breakers that beat against the outermost skerries, how from this distance they seemed to fall in slow motion through the air. Soaking wet I stood there, for the world is beautiful, it’s so beautiful, and I was there in the midst of it.

In the evening, after reading for a few hours, I cut up my face as well. I don’t know why exactly. There was something alluring about it. Very alluring about it. But I’d done it before, and knew that the shame that followed would be almost impossible to bear. It was a case of putting as much time as possible between the event and the shame. So I lay down to sleep. But of course it was impossible. The pain and the warmth of the wounds kept me awake, and I went down to the living room, sat down in the chair by the window, and gazed out at the clouds drifting across the dark sky. Each time the light from the lighthouse swept past, it was as if the shadows outside were roused to life. Some of them retreated instantly, and stood like a group of onlookers around the light, where the remaining shadows writhed and squirmed as if in convulsions, until the light was past and the shadows joined again in close unity.

If I went on like this, I would soon end up as an invalid, I thought, and had to smile, suddenly I could imagine it, me sitting there running a saw back and forth across my thigh, a satisfied smile on my face, the sheet soaked with blood. Tenacity. There would be less of me! The smaller the body, the fewer the problems! The critical, penetrating gaze I gave myself as I sat there without arms and legs: is there any more I can do without? Is there any more I can cut away?

I began to laugh. But I managed to taint even that laughter with my thoughts. Even as I laughed, I realized that the laughter would have something unpleasant about it when it died out, I was alone, it was night, I sat in an empty room, I had just cut up my face and chest, now I was attempting to turn myself into a man who didn’t take himself seriously. And this idea, manifesting itself simultaneously with the impulse to laugh, made unbearable the thought of the instant that would ensue. So I postponed it by laughing longer than strictly necessary. I clung to the image of myself in bed, the saw in my hands, the two bleeding stumps of legs, the eager movements, until the dregs of comic potential were squeezed out of it. But this extended laughter was no longer caused by an impulse outside consciousness, it was thought-induced, and therefore false. I pretended to laugh. To myself. I pretended to laugh to myself.

Exhausted I got to my feet and went up to the bedroom again. I must have fallen asleep instantly, for the next thing I remember was that the room was filled with light, and it was almost eleven a.m.

Oh, it was so good to see the sun again.

Then I remembered what I’d done, and the despair was cold and unendurable. Why hadn’t I just said no? No to the thing inside me that wanted it?

I stayed in bed for a long time, crying.

When it had passed, I went over to the window and looked down at the dock.

“Sniveling doesn’t exactly do me any good,” I said to myself. “There’s no one else here! I’m the only person here!”

I got dressed, went into the bathroom, wet a towel with ice-cold water, and laid it first against my chest, and then my face.

I didn’t look in the mirror.

A desire for more pain revealed itself, and I didn’t say no to it despite what I’d just thought in the bedroom. Pain has something to do with eternity, I’ve always thought, not the slight, short pain, but the pain that throbs and churns and keeps on.

The craving for more, more, more.

I sat on the edge of the bath and began to fill it with water. So hot as to be unendurable was the idea. The scalding hot water on my burning chest and burning face. When it was full, I undressed and dipped a foot in. But it was too hot.

I won’t lose any face over it, I thought. I let out a little of the water and added some cold, got into the bath, and submerged my body.

Even though the temperature was normal, my face and chest began to sting. The room was full of steam, and I opened the little window above the bath, and the steam tumbled into the air outside. At the same moment the water pump began to thud down in the cellar. It sounded as if I were onboard a ship.

When the vapor was out of the room, the water I sat in continued to steam, as if the outside air were peeling gossamer-thin layers off it, I thought, and looked out the window. It was as small as a hatch, but through it I could see the gravel road on the edge of the bay, parts of the neighboring houses and boathouses, the grassy slope up to the lighthouse, the waves that beat on the skerries on the seaward side of the island. These last were especially strange to dwell on, surrounded as my body was with water. Wasn’t there something ingenious about lying in a container full of water several feet above the ground, staring out across the sea? Whenever I thought this, I would sometimes feel a yearning, and it must be yearning in its purest form, because I never knew what I was yearning for. But I liked it; that sudden feeling of expectation, with its quivering nerves and abrupt rush of joy in the breast, was enough in itself. Now and then I would lie there for several hours just staring, without concentrating on what I saw, so that the landscape and its many small events glided dreamily together — at one moment migratory birds stand out against the light blue sky above the hillside, the next I see them land on the telephone wire between the house and the pole on the rise, five yards away, where for several minutes they busy themselves changing places with one another, as if controlled by short, electric impulses — up, over, down, up, over, down — and then they vanish. A fishing boat comes nosing through the inlet, it heaves to just outside the skerry by the northern end of the island, first a man throws out a grapnel, then he stands by the rail and begins to fish with a jig. The door of the house across the bay opens, a dog runs out, followed by my neighbor, with long strides he walks along the road, the dog all the while scurrying back and forth in front of him. Then the door is slammed once more, the boat is gone, the dog tied up in the yard.

It was as if holes had opened in the surface of time, I sometimes thought, where the drop in pressure was so great that the surrounding time was somehow drawn in to fill the vacuum. But also another time was operating, deep below these small ripples on the surface, a force concealed from me that stole hours and minutes, days and weeks, months and years, in whose rhythm my days were little more than the flash of a lighthouse in the darkness of night.

But what did I think about during these periods that could so pucker up the surface of time?

Nothing, I’m sorry to say. Often I couldn’t say what had been happening outside while I lay there, or what I’d actually thought about. No will, no thoughts, no feelings. Only a heart that beat, lungs that breathed, eyes that the changes in the landscape passed through.

I let my body slip under the surface once more, closed my eyes, felt my hair billow gently backward and forward in the water.

Outside a chain saw started up. I stretched over and looked toward my neighbor’s boathouse, where the sound was coming from. He was standing before a great, thick log, which he’d presumably found drifting in a bay earlier that morning. I saw how the chain whirled around, glittering in the sun, and the sawdust began to spurt from the log and cover the light green grass like snow. The blue waves that rolled up the beach just below.