You (50 page)

“They’re here again. I’ll call you right back.”

You turn off the phone. The car stops in front of the Range Rover. Everything’s the way it was before. Nose to nose. You screen your eyes against the headlights and wonder what the girls are going to say to you, when there’s a knock on the driver’s-side window. You flinch. It’s really time for you to calm down. You can see only silhouettes through the tinted glass and so you lower the window. The rustle of the rain fills the inside of the car, droplets splash in your face, and a man looks at you unhappily. He’s wearing a suit, with a turtleneck pullover underneath. His mouth is a thin line, the rain flows down his face in gleaming trails and collects on his chin. You can see he’d anticipated all kinds of things, just not you sitting in this car.

“Who are you?”

“Nobody,” you blurt out and you want to explain why you’re sitting here, and all the ridiculous things that have happened, because he might be the true owner of the Autobiography, and obviously you don’t want to rile him, when the door is pulled open and from then on it all goes very quickly. You fly through the rain and land on the tarmac. You hear a curse, then a second man appears in front of you. He’s wearing a white shirt so drenched with rain that you can clearly see his chest hair through the fabric. He pulls you up from the ground and hammers you against the Range Rover. Once, twice. As if that weren’t enough, you get a slap. Your head flies to the left, your ears ring, you taste blood and are like a puppet that’s just had its strings cut. An arm holds you pressed against the car. Pause. The two men talk to each other as if you weren’t there, their voices are a murmur. The man in the suit appears in front of you again. His mouth moves, you can’t hear anything. Your head is filled with water, you cough. The man grabs your throat, you see the gun in his hand, you are pulled up, your shoulders squeak over the back door of the Range Rover. There’s a liberating crack, a hissing wind chases through your head and blows your ears free.

“Where are they?”

“I … I don’t know, they …”

“Where are those fucking bitches?”

“… they … they’ve stolen … my father’s … my father’s car and …”

The man strikes. It feels as if his fist is wandering through your stomach and shattering your spine. You become a mouth that’s going up and down and waiting to be filled with air. Your lungs are shriveled, your consciousness vanishes.

III

And this is the finale. Now we’re all in Norway, it’s raining on us, and we see you standing there and you’re completely helpless. It feels as if someone’s pulled the ground out from under your feet. Your posture reveals as much. Your shoulders hang down, your eyes are slits, you’re confused.

What’s going on here?

You totter in the rain and again you’re thirteen years old and just a boy standing by the poolside in the icy wind, goose bumps on his skin; but at the same time you’re a man in his mid-forties who went on tirelessly murdering until he realized the senselessness of his action.

Do you feel the ground shaking?

Do you feel reality shifting?

We lost sight of you for three years and thought you’d disappeared forever. The special commission entirely devoted to you was dissolved. The flowers on your victims’ graves have gone unchanged for ages now, and the memory of the Traveler is only one more episode in a collection of cruelties with a short half-life. Yesterday’s disasters have been replaced by new disasters. It’s a flowing change. Sympathy has a short-term memory. You know how the melody goes: We strive for the light, but want to be embraced by the darkness. We hunger for peace and chaos and we are never satisfied, we
want more and more. And that’s where you fall out of the picture, because you’re not a part of us. You’re not a
we
. You’re an
I
.

That’s the reason why we stay by your side right now. We want that
I
. We want your reaction, your helplessness, and we want to see you suffering. Because what could be more charming than a myth that bleeds?

Your chroniclers have wondered what you’ve been up to over the last few years. Some thought you had died, or become weary of yourself.
How much cruelty can an individual person endure?
they wrote in their blogs but never received an answer. A lot of people thought you’d left the country and resumed your traveling elsewhere. Spain. Africa. Maybe India. None of it is true. You got out of a train in Berlin. That was your last stop.

You are still on the road a lot. Every morning you spend half an hour on the toilet, laugh at good jokes and out of politeness at bad ones, and shake your head when someone dies. You still drink your coffee black and feel uneasy when you have to see the doctor. You make love, you curse, you try not to think ill of other people. On election day you stand in line; you feel your balls in the shower for undesirable swellings. Every Sunday you run one extra time around the park because your doctor says it does you good. It’s a pleasant existence. You looked in the darkness for a long time and didn’t find the demon. You learned to live with that disappointment, because you know everything you wanted to know about yourself. Your life is no longer a mystery to you. Millions of people strive to discover the point of their lives. See the goal, reach the goals. Fail and win. You’ve done all that. You are in a perfect state of consciousness. Your account is filled, your future is secure, the years have been good to you.

The big question is why this had to happen to you right here, right now.

You haven’t riled anybody, you haven’t insulted any gods or been guilty of misconduct. Is fate suddenly spitting back after all that time? Is this the final reckoning?

Whatever the answer, you’re in Norway now, you’re standing in the rain, while people openly gape at you, while the sky falls down on you. You look in all directions. However hard you look, your son has disappeared without a trace.

Since your journey to Berlin on the Intercity train, you’ve deliberately worked at getting closer to your boy. Your wife was very suspicious. You were living in another city, and then you were suddenly back as an alien body in the family, with a reawakened interest in your son. Your wife wanted an explanation. You spoke of change. Your wife laughed at you. You knew your son was the only reason you’d never got divorced. She didn’t love you anymore, she just wanted to give Marten a sense of equilibrium. And at the age of sixteen he sounded so grown-up that it brought tears to your eyes.

You had proper boys’ nights out when you went to the movies together, went to handball games and enjoyed your love of cars. Your son opened up hesitantly, but he opened up and that was what mattered.

You didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of your parents—a neurotic mother and a remote father. No, that wasn’t going to happen to you.

As Marten’s eighteenth birthday approached, while searching the internet you happened upon an article about the Quart Festival in Kristiansand. You told Marten about the idea you had of driving the new car to Norway. You saw it in your mind’s eye—wide streets, solitude, and your son at your side. Your first big trip was to be your shared adventure. Eight weeks, four in Kristiansand, four on the west coast. A perfect plan. You and your son.

And now you are soaked to the bone and you enter the restaurant and speak to a waitress in your clumsy English. You say your son was here with four girls, and hold up four fingers. The waitress points around the room. Her English isn’t any better than yours.
Too many people, too many talk
, she says and turns away. You go from table to table, questioning the people and constantly looking outside as if your son might appear at one of the windows and wave
at you. You tried his phone, you left him a message, his voicemail comes on at the sixth ring.

No one has seen him, no one remembers.

You walk back out into the rain. You urgently need to calm down, your throat is tight, the situation makes you sweat. This is new to you.

Say welcome to fear.

“Excuse me …”

The smokers shake their heads, a cleaning woman goes past with a bucket, you barely get half a sentence out and she’s raising her hand.
Sorry
. She doesn’t speak English. You look in the toilets and run twice through the gas station shop. You ask at the register and stand by the exit again, opposite the restaurant, right beside the Range Rover. Marten was at one of these tables and talked to you, he looked at the Range Rover and said:
Of course, I can see it through the window
.

You don’t understand, and call his number again. He won’t have run off with the girls. Marten isn’t like that. You press the phone to your ear and look around.

Please answer
.

The ringing sound comes to you like a whisper. You follow it around the Range Rover. Your son’s phone has slipped a little way under a trailer and glows green to the rhythm of the ringtone. You pick it up.

What’s happened here?

You see dark patches on the tarmac. You touch them, hold your fingers to the light. Blood. You feel dizzy, you lean your back against the Range Rover, unaware that your son was standing in this very spot a quarter of an hour ago. Your eyes are shut so tightly that lights explode in your head. In your head you run through every detail of your conversation.

“The door’s open.”

“What?”

“The driver’s door is open.”

You blink, look at the door, and pull on the handle. The door swings open, the light inside goes on. You can see the driver’s seat is still wet.

He sat here
.

You put your hand on the seat as if you could feel your son’s warmth. It was a quarter of an hour ago. No more than that. You get into the car and have the pleasant feeling of getting closer to your son that way. You close the door and take a deep breath. The rain is locked out. The light dims.

“I think they’ve deliberately left me the key to the Range Rover.”

Your hand seeks and finds the key. It’s in the ignition. You lean your head back, the rain drums on the roof. You’re sitting in a bloody Autobiography, hearing Marten’s voice like a distant radio station:
Her name’s Taja and she’s not
my
girl
. Every word echoes in your head:
She inherited a beach hotel from her grandmother. With a view of a fjord
. You still don’t get it. What’s the connection? Why would they steal your car of all cars, and then come back?

“They’re here again.”

None of it makes any sense. Marten would never have gone with them.

“I’ll call you right back.”

He said he’d call you right back. And why is his phone lying in the road? And what about the blood? You look at your fingertips. There’s no point sitting round here, just do something.

You search the car. There’s an empty candy wrapper on the backseat, some bits of paper on the floor, empty plastic bottles. You open the glove compartment. Sunglasses, five gas station receipts, a blunt pencil, nothing more than that.

You slam the glove compartment shut again and look at the instrument panel. It’s all high-tech. You turn the ignition. The CD player comes on, you turn the sound down. The navigation system lights up and tells you it’s another eight hours and eleven minutes to Ulvtannen. You tap on the display and see the route. It leads north.

“They’re heading further north.”

You start the car. Wherever your son has disappeared to, you’re setting off to bring him back. Because that’s what fathers do for their sons. They protect them.