Tommy straightened up and stepped two paces back. He wiped his hands on his trousers. He closed his eyes and brushed the muck off his forehead. He opened his eyes again. It wasn’t as he had thought it would be. He shouldn’t have come here, he should have waited even longer, but now it was too late.
Jim straightened up as well and walked back and stood beside Tommy and closed his eyes and brushed the dust and muck from his forehead and eyebrows, he sneezed twice, and said:
‘The house needs hoovering. On the outside. What do you think.’
‘About what,’ Tommy said.
‘What do we do now.’
‘Nothing.’
‘Right. Nothing what.’
‘Just burn the whole shit down.’
I ENTERED THE
Social Security office and carefully closed the door behind me. There was something about the light in the room, I thought, an unusual whiteness, it was unpleasant, but I could hardly wear my sunglasses inside, it wouldn’t help my case. I stood looking at the tables where several men, only men, sat hunched over forms they had been asked to fill in, some with a pen frozen in the air just above the paper, and there were several computers along the wall that the clients could use, and at the back, and in front of a desk, half sat, half stood a man desperately trying to explain a very important matter to the woman facing him, and the young woman was not looking merciful, and he was ill at ease, sending glances to both sides to check how many others could hear what he was saying, and I thought, how quickly this year has passed, I can’t understand what happened to it. How slowly it came and went. Each second was painful. Looking back from where I was standing, here, right now, in the middle of this floor, there was little I could remember apart from the nights I drove from this side of Oslo via the forests in Enebakk to the other side to go fishing from the bridge between Ulvøya and the mainland, close by Mosseveien. I do not remember the first time I went there or why, that’s true, but I had no trouble remembering Container Jon and his surprisingly red, almost pink, fingerless mittens in the half-dark only this morning and the gleaming line with the twenty shiny triple hooks on his rig and every single word we said to each other, every single fish I had caught. Not that they were many, neither words nor fish. I hadn’t lost my memory, it wasn’t that. I had no trouble remembering my mother, right up until the day she died, nor the fact that I had no idea what my father looked like, and yet thinking I had seen him several times, as late as in Herregårdsveien only a few hours ago, in the hills from Ljan down to the fjord, and that was more than strange because if anyone, anywhere, at any time had ever had a picture, a photo of my father in a box or a folder or at the bottom of a drawer at home, they had not shown it to me. The psychiatrist I had to see told me I dismissed things that happened to me too quickly, even the most important ones, he said, I didn’t carry them with me and that’s not good for you, he said. Right, I said, well, I suppose it isn’t, but why is it, then, that not long ago I got this leading position at the Oslo Libraries if everything that had happened to me up to that day I had dismissed too quickly. I must have carried something with me, I said, otherwise no one would have put their trust in me and appointed me, I said, because if nothing of what I had learned in life was of any use, but was more like empty boxes, no one would have given me a job, surely that is obvious, I said, to which he said it wasn’t what he meant, and I said, I am aware of that. But then he said, or maybe that’s exactly what I do mean. Because here you are.
He wasn’t stupid, of course.
I hadn’t been to my office since I had sick leave, and that I had after only three weeks, and it made me feel ashamed, and that was probably why I didn’t go in. There was no one I was close to, no one I should or could confide in, I knew nothing about any of them. To be honest, I didn’t want to go there at all, that was the truth, I had not paid attention, I had been looking to the wrong side, and in the rear-view mirror I could see I had already gone too far and everyone I saw was a stranger to me.
Once a month I had to see my boss to review my options and what we could do to get me back to work, if possible, but it was embarrassing for the both of us, and in the end I just dropped by his office and he wrote down in a log that I had been present, and then I left again. Fortunately it was in a different building, a long way from my own office.
The first time it happened I was in the hall putting my shoes on. It was early in the morning. I was alone, I lived alone. I was going in to this job, which still felt new to me after three weeks only, and I had to drive down the long hills to the railway station at the bottom of the valley, for it was too far to walk, and then park my car in the shadows behind the station building with all the others that were going in, catching the train to Oslo. Driving to the city centre during rush hour would be madness. And then all of a sudden I couldn’t breathe and tumbled against the wall and the coats hanging there from their pegs and pulled at least two of them down with me and crashed against the shoe rack, and there was a big plastic shoehorn stuck in behind the rack, and it hit me in the ribs like a spear, and it hurt so much I was about to start howling, which was something I often did in those days, when I was alone, pretty often in fact, it’s true, and it had been like that for quite a while, and I didn’t know why, but this time not a sound came out. I still couldn’t breathe, and I was afraid, of course, thinking this is the end of the line, but then it came back, the air, just as suddenly and hissed into my lungs which swelled up at once, and it was like a stab in my ribs. My God, how that hurt. My temples throbbed, and still lying on the floor by the shoe rack, I managed to coax my mobile phone out of my coat pocket and ring the woman I was once married to. The day it was all over she had said, I thought we would grow old together. No way, I had answered in a defiant, rather childish way, for I felt hurt beyond measure, but now I whispered, Eva, I’m on the floor, something has happened, you have to help me, I whispered, Eva, will you help me, please, and she rang off straight away, and I thought, is she really still that bitter, after all these years, but then she called back a few minutes later and said she had spoken to a doctor at the Central Hospital, and the doctor said I should keep totally calm and not to pull any stunts, so for God’s sake stay where you are and don’t move, Eva said, and I said, here in the shoe rack. Yes, she said, absolutely, if that’s where you landed, and finally, before ringing off, she said, well good luck, then, Jim, and thanks for the memories.
Within twenty minutes the yellow ambulance arrived, turned in to the footpath in front of the block, and they put me on a stretcher and drove off.
I could have been dead by then of course, but at the hospital they didn’t find anything wrong. I was sure I’d had a stroke, some damage to the brain, at least, or a heart attack, something fatal along those lines, anything less would have been sensational, but there was nothing wrong with me that the doctor could trace. It was just the shoehorn. And a headache. He was young, he may have been inexperienced, I thought, but he was unwavering, so there was nothing really to squabble about. And I was relieved of course. In a sense. I wasn’t going to die. But to be honest I felt cheated. When you thought about what had happened, which was fairly dramatic, at least for me, surely there must have been something pretty bad that ailed me, something I could be treated for. But that was
not
what the doctor said, it was probably a one-time event, he said, it could have been any number of harmless things: an unexpected contraction of nerves or a muscle gone astray and it would probably never happen again.
But that’s exactly what it did. Just a few days later. I had been at home off work for three days because of the pain in my ribs. None of them was broken, but it was still unbelievably painful, and there was nothing useful I could do. But on the morning of the fourth day, I pulled myself together and swallowed a painkiller, a Paralgin forte, after breakfast, and left home and parked by the station down in the valley, as I was supposed to, and caught the train to Oslo, and it was so unbelievably stupid, because it happened in the lift on the way up. Between the second and third floors I began to gasp for air, and the people standing around me turned to see what was going on, and when I dropped to my knees they all squeezed back against the walls. There must have been six or seven of them in the lift, and they were all scared stiff and not one of them said a word to me or to each other. The situation was awkward. I clenched my lips and tried to stop the gasping, but it was plain impossible, and then the air stopped coming, and I keeled over like I did the last time. It will come back, I thought as I fell to the floor, and of course it did, thirty seconds later the air came back, and I guess it sounded strange when I sucked it in because it was pretty loud, and a man hit the red button on the panel with his fist and the lift jerked to a halt. The others tumbled in all directions, but I was already down, and we were stuck between the fourth and fifth floors, and of course it was the wrong button, he should have hit the alarm, not the emergency stop, and what were we supposed to do there, between two floors.
Slowly I got up. First, on to my knees. Then on to one leg. Then the other. I was breathing hard. When I was standing straight the lift started again and it stopped on the fifth, and then on the sixth. The last passengers got off, including me, and not one of them met my eye on their way out, and I didn’t look at them either, my eyesight was gone, that was why. When the lift was empty I went back in and, half-blind, I pressed the button for the ground floor, and down in the entrance hall my sight returned, and I already felt a little better.
It was not a long walk to the Central Station. I bought a ticket from one of the machines, and slumped back in a corner with my collar turned right up and my chin sunk down below the top button, and I realised I would probably never again turn up to work at the Oslo Libraries, that it was over almost before it had begun, and where was I heading now. I had no idea.
Back home, I locked myself in my flat, went to the phone, called my doctor and explained to him what had happened. Shit, that doesn’t sound good at all, he said, and promised me he would send a sick note to the proper authority and a copy to me, and then I had to get round to his surgery at the double. OK, I said, I will, I’ll be right over, I said, and I put the phone down and undressed and walked into my bedroom and got into bed and stayed there for several days, a week almost. I hardly had anything to eat. I didn’t get up until one morning someone came to my door and leaned on the bell and wouldn’t stop. I didn’t feel like getting up, I wanted to remain in my state of drowsiness, so pleasantly half-dead. But I got up anyway. It took me such a long time to dress. I was sure the person who had been ringing the bell was already at the next door when I finally came through the hall to open up, but he wasn’t. Behind him he had a trolley of the kind I had seen newspaper boys use when they were out doing their early-morning rounds with me standing at the window staring out because I couldn’t find any sleep and saw them coming down the hill with their trolleys behind them from the bus stop, where the newspapers were thrown out from the van in firmly tied, fat bundles and the van didn’t even stop, but just kept on driving with the sliding door still open and no one but the paper boys was out on the roads yet.
On the trolley there were several boxes. He sold books. I asked him what books, and he said, Maigret, Georges Simenon’s novels about Police Inspector Maigret, in Paris, in the eleventh arrondissement, he said, if I knew what an arrondissement was, and I said I did, I had been to Paris several times, to conferences. He opened one of the boxes he had on the trolley, and there they were, fifteen blue volumes, each with two novels inside and gold letters on the spine, and I asked how much they cost, and he said five hundred kroner. I bought them on the spot. I took a five-hundred note from my wallet and thanked him for the books and closed the door and went in and put the Maigret books on the floor beside the bed and crept back under the duvet. By the end of the week I had read them all, and when I got up I put the books back in the box and the box in the closet, on the shelf under the biscuit tin with the fishing gear in it.
Then I went to see the doctor.
When he saw me coming through the door, he went all cranky and said, where the hell have you been, weren’t you supposed to be here almost two weeks ago, how can I possibly find out what’s wrong with you if you don’t come and stand in the goddamn queue like everyone else, and then I wept a little on the chair, facing his desk, it was difficult not to, and there and then he wrote me an indefinite sick note and now I had been away from work for a whole year, to the day in fact, they were meticulous at the Social Security office. They had sent me a letter telling me that this was the end of my benefits. Now something new would have to be pulled from the hat, I was aware of that, a year had passed. It was the law, and that was the matter I had come here to discuss.
I walked between the tables in the Social Security office in Lillestrøm and stopped at a suitable distance from the despondent man facing the young woman at the desk. I could see only his back. It was broad and there was not much else but muscle under his shirt. He had his jacket over his arm, and a coat over the jacket, and he looked pretty warm now, his neck was red, his face white and embarrassed when he half turned and sent me a grey glance over his shoulder, the left one, and slowly shook his head, and turned back and said, right, right, that’s fine, that’s all fine, it will all be fine in the end young lady, don’t worry, in an ironic tone, so it was probably not fine at all. I’m not worried, the young woman said, and I couldn’t see her, but her voice cut like a scythe through the grass, and the man rolled his eyes and gave me a nod as he left. I nodded back, and it was my turn.
‘Just a moment,’ she said and started writing whatever she had to write on the form in the computer next to her. I didn’t know what was wrong with the man in front of me in the queue, but there had to be quite a bit because she kept writing for some time, and I was beginning to feel warm myself and thought maybe I should take my jacket off, but I knew that if I did, I had lost. I didn’t know what I would have lost, but I would have lost something.