You (21 page)

“But … you could have …”

“Of course I should have told you everything before, then you’d probably have emigrated at six years old to go and find your mother. Forget it. Now you’ve finished school and you can do what you like. You’re grown up, you can deal with it all by yourself. I’ve done my best.”

“You’ve done what?”

He looked at the joint and stubbed it out. He didn’t think about repeating himself. You saw him picking up the remote control and turning the television back on as if your conversation was over. Then you got up, bent over the coffee table, and, with suppressed rage,
asked your father one last time who that had been on the phone. You needed to hear it.

He didn’t take his eyes off you.

“It was your mother, she lives in Ulvtannen and she wanted—”

“YOU MISERABLE PIECE OF SHIT!”

“Hey, listen, it was done with the best of—”

“I HATE YOU, I WISH YOU WERE DEAD!”

He stopped, he saw the tears in your eyes, he saw your fury, and through his haze and his ignorance he must have understood that you were entirely serious. You wanted to pick up the wooden box and smack him with it. You’ve never been violent, you’d had one fight with a girl from the other class because she’d kicked out at Ruth. Violence isn’t a solution, everyone knows that. But on this particular day you understood for the first time what leads to violence.

Disappointment, helplessness, weakness.

Your father saw all those things in your eyes, and a change occurred. In his face, in his eyes. He was shocked. He sank back down on the sofa and sighed. Once. You heard a cracking sound. His right hand was twitching, his left hand was a claw that held the remote control so firmly that the plastic broke.

“Dad?”

He only looked at you. He didn’t blink. It was a little as if he’d seen something in you that he’d never seen before. Darkness. His mouth opened and shut again. He sat there motionlessly and his gaze was his gaze for several seconds, until something disappeared.

That day you had no idea what it was that disappeared, and while you tell your girls about it you hear yourself whispering that it might have been his soul—for a moment fear flashed in your father’s eyes, a moment later his gaze was blank and lost and still directed at you.

And so it happened that you killed your father.

Of course you’ve thought about death, but you didn’t really expect that it would catch you like that. Your ideal would have been to drift away unnoticed at a great age. A hot bath and the right music in the background, a bottle of red wine, and you would have gone to sleep gently and contentedly. Instead you have this furious daughter yelling at you as if you were the lowest of the low. You should never have let it come to this. What were you thinking of?

Your death takes place in stages. Taja stands in front of you for a moment, shouting at you as you stub out your joint and hope she’ll calm down. A moment later there’s darkness and you don’t understand what’s happened. Something’s missing. The transition. The switch-off. You’re dead, without understanding it. And you always thought there would be an understanding.

The darkness persists. And in that darkness your body starts changing. From top to bottom, even though you can’t feel it, you know it’s happening. As if your body were bidding you a sighing farewell.
As if all the light were vanishing from it, flowing and leaking away.

When the light comes back, it happens all of a sudden and you’re staring at the ceiling. The colors explode around you and you want to breathe out with relief and tell Taja that this has been the worst trip ever. But the trip isn’t over, it’s only just started. Everything starts and ends with death. But you really didn’t expect that it would catch you like this. If you’re honest, there are lots of things in your life that you didn’t expect—not a crazed father bringing you and Ragnar up like a dictator; not a brother who abandoned you at the age of twelve; but certainly not a life in Norway and a wife like Majgull. Not to mention your daughter.

“Dad?”

If you could cry, you’d cry now. Christ, how long has it been since she called you Dad? And she means it. It’s not her voice that gives it away, it’s her thoughts, her feelings. You can read her effortlessly. As if you had a mental connection. It’s a world suddenly opening up to you. You have access to every thought, every emotion. And what can you do with it? Nothing. You’re just an observer who can’t intervene. How fucked is that?

Really fucked
.

Taja pulls at you, the ceiling vanishes from your field of vision, you are sitting up again and looking at your little one. Her fingertips stroke your face as if you might shatter if she made a false move, then she recoils and runs away. Shame, fear.

Poor girl
.

And as she flees, you suddenly understand what has happened. Her thoughts come fluttering after her like nervous birds, they find you and talk to you and you don’t believe them. And don’t believe them. And don’t want to believe them.

You sense Taja’s presence in the room before you see her. Your eyes don’t obey you any more than your body does. You stare straight ahead. Taja comes and stands right in front of you as if to catch your
eye. She doesn’t want to think the word
death
. She thinks everything else. She doesn’t want to touch you again. She breathes guilt and vanishes from your field of vision.

Taja is back. She’s been thinking. She’s been crying. One of her knuckles is dark. She must have hit the wall. She could never keep her feelings under control. Now she’s sitting next to you. Her hands touch you.

You feel nothing.

Her hands on your neck.

Nothing.

Her head on your shoulder.

Nothing. But you know what she’s thinking.

I hear her thoughts, and if I hear them, perhaps it’ll work …

No.

But if I can see and hear her, perhaps she can …

No, it’s over. There’s no going forward and there’s no going back. You can receive, but you can’t transmit. Get used to it.

And so it grows dark outside, and your daughter leans against your lifeless body and sleeps, while you listen to her thoughts as if to a secret radio station broadcasting only to you. You’re still stunned. You know you’ve gone too far, but do you have to end like this? You and your guilt and your shame.

You listen to your daughter’s anxieties, her helplessness, her fury. And the question comes back again and again:
Can he forgive me? Will he forgive me?

You stare a hole into the room. A dead man waiting to see what happens next. And as you’re waiting, the dead cells in your body start breaking down. Enzymes rage through your tissue. Rigor mortis leaves you. Only your fist goes on clutching the remote control like a claw, and won’t let go of it. The rest of your body gives in. As if it wanted to be a gentle pillow for your daughter one last time.

Daylight comes. Taja wakes with a start and vanishes from your side. She’s repelled. She wants to wash and that’s fine, you would have done exactly the same. She’s revolted by death.

When she comes back the light is different, the sun has reached the opposite wall, hours have passed. Taja pushes the armchair further away from you. You see her arm, her leg, you only see her face at the edge of your field of vision. Your daughter doesn’t want you to stare at her. She studies her cell phone as if it holds all the answers. Her thoughts are:

She gnaws at her thumbnail. You thought she’d have shaken that habit by now, and as if she can hear your thoughts she wipes her thumb on her jeans, draws in her legs and hugs herself. You wish you could hold her, of course you forgive her. She’s your daughter. Even if no one deserves to die like that, you can’t be angry with your daughter. A father is a father is a father.

Then Taja disappears again.

You see the sun wandering across the living room.

The opposite wall turns dark, the wall turns light.

You hear music from the floor above. Your toothpaste jingle blares twice from the phones, then silence. Taja’s probably taken the batteries out. You prefer the music anyway. Alabama 3. You gave her the CD because you thought then she might sit next to you one
evening and you could watch
The Sopranos
and enjoy the title song. She thought the series was strangely quiet. That’s exactly how she put it.
Strangely quiet
. But she liked the music.

She appears in front of you. She’s been drinking. She’s plundered the bar. Cognac, Metaxa, schnapps. If you could smell her you’d know she smells bad. She’s already thrown up twice and at any moment she’s going to go to the fridge and get the vodka out of the freezer. She’s like you. Weak and in search of release. Forgetting is the magic formula of the cowards. There’s so much she wants to ask you, her head is a book full of questions, then she laughs, because she knows it’s stupid to talk to a dead person.

“And now I’ll drink your vodka,” she says and disappears again.

The living room turns dark.

Your daughter stands in the kitchen drinking your vodka.

The CD comes to an end, the CD starts over again.

Woke up this morning
.

Night.

Light in the corridor. Taja staggers through your field of vision. She hasn’t slept, her thoughts are overwrought, she’s drunk and teary and throws a plastic bag down on the table. Almost as an accusation.

You’re surprised that she’s found the heroin. Even though you haven’t made much of an effort with the grass and it’s lying around all over the place, you’ve always been very careful with the hard drugs. Once again it goes to show how naïve you’ve been. Your daughter knows everything about you. Where the drugs are, where you hide your dirty secrets. She probably found your private stash of porn ages ago, and knows about the cameras as well. It wouldn’t surprise you, everything’s possible where Taja’s concerned. And if someone doesn’t come by soon and save her, your little one could go completely crazy.

To watch your own child going increasingly to pieces over the course of two days is pure pain. But hearing all of her thoughts and being powerless, perhaps that’s the true hell after death. Not really disappearing, persisting in a state in which you’re aware of everything
that’s happening around you, observing the decay, helplessly, in a state of nonexistence. And to be carried to the grave like that—knowing, but unable to do anything with your knowledge. After millennia of evolution, finally taking another step forward and not being able to use the knowledge because you’ve ceased to exist.

On Friday evening Taja turns crazy. Perhaps it’s your smell, perhaps it’s her doubts. What is she supposed to do?
Hello, my father’s been sitting around dead for two days since I killed him, can you come and collect him?
You can see it in her, guilt, and more guilt. She’s drinking, she’s barely eating, she looks at you, she looks at the heroin. You want to warn her. She doesn’t know what she’s got in front of her. That heroin’s dynamite. Totally pure. Stuff like that is rare on the market. Hardly anyone can cope with quality like that. You could make neural bombs with that stuff, it’s nuclear.

Please, little one, don’t
.

She’s done it. She sits there and raises her glass to you. If you could, you would look away. You can see everything. Her euphoria and her sleep, how she gets her strength back and then collapses in on herself like an empty balloon. And then how she throws up on the floor, she is not strong enough to make it to the bathroom, she is so tired of herself. Every now and again she explodes with exaggerated activity, running with the cell phone clenched in her fist from one corner of the living room to the other, she doesn’t make a single call, wants to sort it all out by herself, doesn’t know how, but wants to. Stubborn and guilty. Her face above the table, the straw leaving a clean track on the wood, her contented
ahhh
, rubbing her nose and looking at you and looking at you and then deciding.