Wait Blink Read online

  * * *

  While Linnea jumps into the shower, showers, gets out of the shower, and starts to take some clothes out of the suitcase that she’s left on a small sofa, we might ask, who is Linnea? If we think of the woodland flower she’s named after (a small pink and white bell-like flower that grows on the forest floor, which looks as though it’s blushing bashfully because you’re standing there above it with your hiking boots planted stoutly in the heather as you bend down to get a closer look at it), we might expect her to be a small, delicate person. Which is, indeed, the case. Linnea is small and slight and often walks with her head down, as though she were a small bell-like flower who wanted to keep things to herself, who blushed at the thought of anyone looking at her. Exquisite is what she is.

  * * *

  As a child, Linnea split her time between the antique shop that her parents ran and a home full of antique furniture. Before she started school, she spent part of the day at the antique shop and the other part with her parents in their living room, where they used to show films and slides on an old projector. Linnea loved it, she loved sitting in the dark, but was it actually the film she watched? No. Linnea loved to watch the beam of light from the projector and the swirling dust that seemed to be trapped inside it. That was where she wanted to be: there with the light beam and dancing dust, with the smell of the canvas and the knowledge that her parents were sitting close together on the rococo sofa behind her, engrossed in the film, barely visible, like two rococo ornaments, in the dark. Not interested in her, and not interested in the fact that she was sitting looking at the beam of light, not the film, and that for her it was incomprehensible, pure magic, that the pictures were carried on the dusty light beam only to appear on the canvas. They noticed none of this. When film showings were a thing of the past and the ages of VHS and then DVD had started, she forgot the beam of light for a while. Until she was seventeen and saw a chandelier in her parents’ antique shop. The chandelier hung in a dark corner of the shop and gave off a glittering, self-contained play of light. Suddenly she remembered: the light from the projector, the dust dancing in the beam, sitting there looking at it. And she must have thought, oh. And she was compelled to ask if she could have the chandelier, only to hear the word “no.” It was far too valuable. But what if it was what she wanted more than anything in the world? “No.” But, she thought, she was the glittering yet contained play of light from the chandelier! And every time she saw a chandelier later, she thought about who she was: the closed play of light.

  * * *

  At film school, this was her greatest wish: to be able to film something that could show this play of light. And preferably show it on a semi-perforated screen, so that she could set up spotlights behind the screen, and shine them on the audi ence through the screen, so they would gasp in wonder. An “Oooohhh” would ripple through the room.

  * * *

  But: that’s not possible, her lecturer told her. How do you think your audience will be able to see anything if you light the screen from behind? The screen would be white, the film faded to nothing. It’s not possible. Oh, Linnea thought. She was too old now to ask the question: “But what if it’s what I want more than anything in the world?”

  * * *

  In other words, Linnea hasn’t had much luck with her wishes in life, and now she’s standing by the window again, fresh out of the shower, in her underwear, holding a sweater in her hands and wishing that G öran were there. But is he? No.

  * * *

  (For your information: at this precise moment, while Linnea is standing by the window in Copenhagen, G öran F ältberg is lying asleep in his bed at home in Uppsala. Both he and his wife have overslept considerably this morning; his wife is lying beside him and the room is filled with their regular breathing. It’s dark and cool, and the cover of the duvet that’s wrapped around the husband and wife like two cocoons is white. G öran’s chin has fallen to his chest, his eyes look sunken, his hair is short and white, as is his beard, and in the dark, the whiteness makes him look almost supernatural. He is dreaming, an uneasy dream, about some corridors at the university that just get longer and longer the farther he walks down them; unsettled by the fluorescent tube on the ceiling that’s flickering, he holds out his keys and rattles them, which seems a very odd thing to do, G öran thinks in his dream, but he shakes and rattles them more and more intensely as he walks along the endless corridors, and it almost feels like he’s been hypnotized by the flickering lights reflected in the flashing keys. So that is where G öran is, in his bed in Uppsala, in his dream of the rattling keys, at precisely the moment that Linnea stands by the window and wishes he were in Copenhagen.)

  5

  And here we see the artist Trine (thirty-two), who would rather have been called Tracey Emin (if she’d had the choice), but she isn’t, sitting in an oversized dressing gown, looking out the window at the other windows that face onto the back courtyard of the cheap hotel where she’s staying. It’s nine o’clock in the morning of that same January day, and as far as she can tell, Oslo is functioning as it should; people are walking to work through the peculiar grayish white light of Slottsparken, between the black tree trunks and over the duck pond, covered with the thinnest crust of ice, and over the grass, which is probably thick with frost but is bare of snow. Trine, who is quite pleased that she’s called Trine, which after all is a kind of Norwegian version of Tracey, which is the name of her greatest idol, Tracey Emin, rubs her cold feet against each other and then turns to watch some walruses on television. They swim purposefully through greenish-blue water.

  * * *

  If it had been seventeen months ago, she would have been sitting here with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. The coffee would be steaming hot, and her cigarette would glow whenever she took a drag with her sensual mouth. If it had been seventeen months ago, she would have drunk too much yesterday, or, to put it another way, she would have drunk as much as she always drank, too much, whereas in fact it wasn’t too much, as it was exactly what she always drank. She would have sat here regretting she’d flashed her tits, not because she had shown them, but because she knew it would be interpreted as “aggressive performance,” an artistic expression by a woman who wasn’t afraid to use her whole disgusting self, but it wasn’t about that at all, it was simply good old-fashioned flashing, in protest, in revenge. An idiotic revenge, really, because the man she wanted to avenge herself on (Knut, forty-four), wasn’t even there, was conspicuous by his absence, in fact. In that sense it was a kind of cosmic, universal revenge, on everything and everyone, because her life was crap. Go fuck yourselves. It was that simple, that stupid. But it was awful, Trine would have thought, not to be able to do something as banal and stupid without it being interpreted as “aggressive performance.” Has she used herself in her art to such an extent that there is no longer any division between what she does in her private life and in her public life? she’d have commented loudly to herself, pulling a face. Fuck that, Trine would have said to her cup of coffee, because in many ways it was a calculated risk that something of the sort might happen; only, if the truth be told, it was a little tiresome all the same. She couldn’t exactly go around explaining everything she did, saying “this is art” or “that is not art” or “that can be seen as something in the gray area between art and not art,” or “you’ll have to ask me later if that was art,” or “please see this as the individual Trine’s personal opinion,” but “this, on the other hand, the fact that I’m offending you, is in my role as an artist—Trine the individual would never do that.” Fuck. “Fuck,” Trine would have said out loud and laughed, as she thought that “fuck” was such a ridiculous word, absurdly unradical, absurd in its total lack of content as a word, and yet, so effective. She would have regretted kissing Urban, a short, fumbling curator from up north, simply to keep herself upright, simply as revenge. But then, what’s the point of regret, she would have said, taking a sip of her coffee: What, she would have said, is, then taken a drag of her ci
garette, the point? Fuck that. Fuck again! Fuck, you need to get out of my discourse, you lovely word, she would have said. You lovely little word.

  * * *

  But instead Trine had to put her head in her hands. There would have been too much noise in her head, a ringing in her ears, the music had been too loud yesterday. Seventeen months ago, head in hands, she would have pictured the face of Knut, the great curator from the east, whom she’d loved and lost. Whom she’d once seduced, about a year before that, by grabbing him between the legs outside a restroom in the art gallery and whom she’d had an extremely passionate on-and-off relationship with ever since. She would have, seventeen months ago, sat here and remembered Knut’s face saying “I love you, you were right,” at the train station early one morning and then, shoulders hunched in his leather jacket, he disappeared into the crowd, after she, night after night, had buried her face in his chest and said that she was sure that he loved her, without him saying anything in response, but now, now that she was about to take the train west, she somehow mystically knew that she would never see him again. Enough, she tells her hands, seventeen months ago, in exactly the same room in exactly the same hotel, I’ve seen Knut’s face enough now, spoken enough nonsense, love doesn’t exist, I’ve allowed myself to love someone, what a mistake, she says, and laughs at the last sentence. “I’ve allowed myself to love someone, what a mistake,” what a clich éd sentence, what a clich é of an experience, what a clich é that he should say that, it sounded like a script, the end of a film, which he then followed up with an email that said, “This won’t work. I’m a crater, and you are too. And crater plus crater doesn’t work.” What a clich é, what a clich é! that she’d hoped he would turn up all the same, at the opening yesterday, but he didn’t. She needs to meet someone from the south, she tells herself, seventeen months ago, that’s what she needs. Someone from the south. People are decent there, they’re not short and fumbling like northerners, they’re not big and brutal like easterners, and they haven’t been destroyed by intense internal noise like us westerners. It’s perfectly clear, she says to her hands, it has to be someone from the south. But: it wouldn’t work anyway. It’s all just more trouble. But she will, yes! She will! She’ll make a quilt that says “I only want to be loved.” But she can’t, damn, Tracey Emin’s already used quilting. Or was it a quilt? No, it wasn’t! It was neon. “Just Love Me” written in pink neon. It was only yesterday that she saw it, at the exhibition, where she’d been part of the opening, with her performance “half naked, half dressed,” out in the foyer, wearing a straitjacket on top and a G-string below. She’d found the words “Just Love Me” in a book about Tracey Emin that she’d sat looking at behind some bookshelves as she got steadily more drunk after the performance and should really have stood up, and in her drunken state she was blown away by the simple statement in pink neon, just love me, and started to cry, until Urban came and found her and she decided that kissing him might help the situation. Jesus! How quickly is it possible to forget something? It normally takes years before she forgets things and can use them in her art and think that she’s being original, but this time it took less than a night. It must be (a) all the noise, (b) all the alcohol, (c) all the smoking, (d) all the stupid kissing with short curators from up north, just to help her stay on her feet, and forget Knut, from the east, (e) all the flashing, (f) sleeping on the steps outside the hotel, (g) being carried up the steps by someone, (h) all the tottering toward the bed on high heels, (i) all the sleeping with her face pressed into the pillow and her ass in the air, as she’s been told she’s slept since she was a baby.

  * * *

  That was how things would have been seventeen months ago. But this morning, now, is radically different. She drank practically nothing last night. She didn’t kiss anyone. And she isn’t sitting there with a cigarette in her hand either, because she stopped smoking about seventeen months ago, when she found out she was pregnant by the man who’d left her at a train station, and who had made her flash her tits so pathetically in protest. She’s sitting in a hotel room that’s spectacularly dull in terms of its decor, with a blue wall-to-wall carpet, and a narrow bed with white bed linen, and a chair with a reddish wooden frame and gray patterned fabric. And a TV, which is on: there are three huge walruses on the screen, diving down through greenish-blue water to the seabed to eat mussels. And Trine is sitting on the chair, with a cup of coffee, looking out at the back courtyard of the hotel, seeing nothing other than more windows to other rooms in the hotel. And her feet are cold and dry and bare, and she rubs them together, and feels how cold and dry they are, but can’t be bothered to look for any socks to warm them up. And there’s something disgusting about the fact that they’re so dry, about the sound of her dry feet rubbing against each other; she had better stop rubbing them. The walruses start to dig around in the mud with their flippers, looking for mussels, and the water around them becomes cloudy.

  6

  Now, however, we’re back on a January day ten years ago. And here we see Viggo (twenty-one at the time), who has just fallen off his bike, and we see one of his eyeteeth, which has been bothering him for a few years but has come loose in the past year since he had his root canal done and a gold tooth put in, fly through the air. It’s 1998, and Viggo is cycling to his grandmother’s funeral and has just collided in the most spectacular fashion with a bike stand, somersaulted over the handlebars, hit his jaw on a sign that says CUL-DE-SAC in such a way that his gold tooth loses its weak hold and flies through the air. And we follow the gold tooth’s short flight through the air, then see it fall between two iron bars down into a drain in the gutter. And what happens to the tooth then is this: it is carried out to sea, via long underground canals. And there it is gobbled up by a salmon on its way to Greenland, who thinks it’s found a rare delicacy. It will eventually end up on a fish counter, as the salmon will be caught. And there it will flash and catch the attention of someone who is going to be very important to Viggo, one January day ten years hence. But before that happens, it has to gleam in the belly of a salmon. And before that, Viggo has to fall off his bike. And all Viggo’s external features—his pale, almost transparent eyes, his face, which, though pale, still looks dark, and his thick brown hair that falls down into his eyes—all combine to give an impression of intense pain. Ooowww! Viggo shouts and puts his hand to his face.

  * * *

  Viggo has been a reader all his life. A dreamer, a thinker, a lone wolf. Or perhaps a sheep, if the metaphorical animal ought to be more suited to Viggo’s character. A lonely sheep, always on the fringes of the flock, wool a-trembling. As a child, strangely enough, his only friend was St åle the thug, who always defended him, following an event that we’ll come back to later, and this meant that Viggo was left in peace with his books at recess. It was only natural that Viggo should go on to study literature, given what he was like. It was only in literature that he found his soul mates. And peace. And if he took a course where everyone was studying literature, then surely he would find a real-life soul mate?

  * * *

  But no. When he moved away from home to study literature in Oslo, he immediately discovered that he didn’t fit in there either. Largely because he didn’t drink. He didn’t drink! Because: oh, it’s a long story, but okay: it’s because Viggo absolutely believes in being true to oneself—that’s why he doesn’t drink alcohol. It’s a personal belief that’s helped him to weather being bullied at primary school and to deal with feeling lonely. And the feeling that he just had to go home the only time he tried to go to a party when he was sixteen and saw people who normally behaved in a certain way behaving in a completely different way as soon as they got drunk. They came over and hugged him and said that he was sweet, and it made him feel sick. Why couldn’t they say that when they were sober? he thought and decided then and there never to drink. He was going to be true to who he was! Surely at some point he would meet someone who had the same feelings as he did, deep down? Someone who had escaped to the
bike shed to read while the others played football? Someone who trembled too, someone who had days when they were so nervous that even the slightest sensory impression might knock them off-kilter—when, for instance, the densely patterned tights of the lady in front of them might make them rush to the nearest bush and throw up, because the tights made them so inexplicably anxious? Someone like him, who on days like that, when everything just went right in without any filter, might also, for example, come to believe, and most vehemently, that a box of matches or a paper clip lying on a desk was about to explode?

  * * *

  But so far, it hadn’t happened! And then one day when he was sitting in a lecture theater at the University of Oslo, the female lecturer, who was talking about Kafka’s The Castle, Viggo’s favorite book other than Dante’s Divine Comedy, was so nervous and was sweating so much that she drew a kind of Hitler mustache on herself when she touched her upper lip with two fingers covered in whiteboard marker smudges, to the delight and concealed sniggers of his non-soul-mates, and Viggo found himself taken aback. Here was someone who was just as nervous as he was when faced with the world. He sweated like that too when he was nervous! And all his life, people had whispered and sniggered about him as well.