Wait blink, p.12
Wait, Blink, page 12
* * *
But, she says, not many people know that it was actually Daniil Kharms who wrote about it first!
11
We’ll just pause the second crash for a moment to go back and think about the old woman who crashed into the big van earlier on. She’s crashed into a van, she’s waved away some ladies in white coats, but what no one knows, other than us, is that this is the last day of her life. And yet she’s not going to play a bigger role in this novel than that, she’s just going to float in the water, just like the novel’s own little log. All she does is wave off some ladies in white coats and then: disappears from the story, which is quite symbolic, really, given that the day we meet her, this day, is the day that she dies. So what about this old lady? What about this old lady’s entire life? What about the fact that she’s taught French grammar at the University of Bergen ever since she got her degree, that she likes coffee with brown sugar, that she doesn’t have children, that she’s sharper than most people and that her specialty is the French imparfait tense, which can be translated as the “past continuous,” and that she’ll shortly have a fatal heart attack in a parking lot, possibly triggered by the stress of crashing into another car, and thus, forever, pass into the passé simple, the “simple past” tense? And what about what she was doing early this morning, not knowing that it would be the last time she’d do it, those little, everyday things, like drying herself with a hand towel? What about the fact that the old lady, as she walked to her car to drive into town and find a lot that was slightly out of the way, which was where she was heading when she turned onto the road and hit a reversing van, what about the fact that she was thinking about something she’d dreamed during the night, something very strange: that she was at home in Ørsta, and that it was December and dark and there was snow everywhere. And that she walked down the small pedestrian street with shops on either side, and everything was closed and there were Christmas stars in all the windows and plastic spruce garlands with yellow and red lights strung between the shops on either side. And these crisscrossed the street with their yellow and red lights as far as the eye could see, and she passed a shop she’d never noticed before, a small green storefront squeezed between the other stores, with a sign that said CINNAMON SHOP. And she went over to the window and looked in and saw that it was true, there was cinnamon everywhere. Cinnamon in small glass bottles in the window, cinnamon in small glass bottles and small paper bags on the shelves behind the counter. Cinnamon in kilo bags. Loose-weight cinnamon under the glass counter. How, she thought, does a shop like this survive? Don’t people buy cinnamon in the supermarket? Where they can buy whatever else they might need, cookies, coffee, and bread, she thought in her dream as she stood in front of the window. How much cinnamon would you need in different forms and weights to make you go to the cinnamon shop to buy it? This is what the old lady was pondering, very much awake now as she headed to her car for her last drive in this life. What does one say, she wondered as she pulled her car keys out of her pocket, when one goes into a cinnamon shop? I’d like some cinnamon, please? Isn’t that obvious? Or should you say: Do you have any cinnamon? No, that would make a mockery of the cinnamon shop. The person standing behind the counter would give you a look that clearly said: Idiot. This is a cinnamon shop: of course we have cinnamon! Perhaps, for that reason, it was a silent shop, where there was no need to say anything other than please and thank you, which could be alternated, depending on which transaction was being made (handing over money) (handing over cinnamon) (accepting money) (accepting cinnamon)? The old woman didn’t know, but she thought about the feeling she’d had in her dream as she walked away from the cinnamon shop that stood alone in the middle of the pedestrian street, in the December dark one evening in a dream, after closing time, with Christmas stars shining in every direction, and the cinnamon shop’s green wooden facade gently illuminated by all the stars: perhaps the cinnamon shop was the only mystery left in this world, and thank goodness for that, thank goodness for the cinnamon shop, thank goodness that it was there, squeezed in between the multitude of other consumer stores, and only sold the one thing, cinnamon, and was so baffling, so utterly baffling, and yet at the same time totally banal and simple and obvious in its existence.
* * *
Yes, what about that? What about the fact that the old lady was thinking about all this before she died? And, taking a wider perspective, what about the role that such dreams play when you’re going to die? What kind of existence could one say they’d had? They’ve existed, because they’ve been in someone’s head. But they’ve never been shared with anyone else. They’ve existed, they were vibrant and vivid in their existence. What happens to the dreams one’s had when one forgets them the minute after one’s woken? What happens to the dreams one’s had and never told to anyone because one dies before one gets the chance? Did they fly out of her, did she forget? Did they fly out of her like small butterflies when her heart crashed, when all that remained of her was a dream about an absurd cinnamon shop, something invisible that disappeared out of her body, along with herself? Sadly, we will never know the answer to these questions.
12
Could one imagine a place similar to the kingdom of death in the Aeneid, where rather than bodies or souls, people’s dreams were gathered together to shamble around like Virgil’s dead? The bad dreams gathered in one place and the good dreams in another? The bad ones sliding, seeking, grieving, seeking, grieving, toward someone about to enter their kingdom (who would that be?) , or like those in Elysium, transparent, beautiful, happy, but gliding, gliding all the time in such a way that one can’t tell whether they even have feet with which to touch the ground, dreams like almost transparent bubbles floating over the shining ground, with the light from the sky (the sky is opaque and white) shining through them, so that we (whoever we may be) could see them floating past like tiny plays?
* * *
And would they come gliding toward us (whoever we may turn out to be), happy to see us, happy to be able to show themselves to someone, and play frantically before our eyes on their little bubbles for fear that we might move on with out paying attention to their tiny plots and often absurd symbolism? And would some dreams be as beautiful as Dido, who turns away from Aeneas in shame, and who will never, not even here, in the strange and peculiar land of dreams, be able to show themselves to us—dreams that came here to hide, never to be seen, to glide along endlessly, locked into their sorrow at their own existences?
* * *
Or are dreams like tiny newborn moon jellyfish, which loosen from their polyps at the bottom of the sea and pulse their transparent way up through the layers of water, until we can no longer see them from where we’re sitting on the seabed with our faces upturned, with our tightly closed mouths and our blinking eyes that bulge slightly because of the pressure, and the tiny bubbles that fizz around our noses and mouths and our hair floating back and forth in front of our faces like seaweed as we sit there and try to fathom their origins?
13
And now: back to what’s happening outside the caf é where K åre and Sigrid are sitting. The black and the blue cars have to move because they’re blocking traffic, so the men drive into the multistory parking garage. Sigrid feels embarrassed, cut off, because she’s spoken too fast and enthusiastically about the fact that it was Daniil Kharms and not Albert Camus who first wrote about the absurdity of seeing someone gesticulating behind glass, and because K åre’s reaction was only to stare absentmindedly out the window. But she feels that it’s important that she be independent and bold, and that she doesn’t allow herself to be put off by his lack of response and lack of attention. So she leans back in her chair and decides to relax. He sits there, looking out—and he should be allowed to do so. She tries to find something else to think about.
* * *
At first she can’t think of anything to think about. She just thinks about how uncomfortable it feels that they’re not say ing anything, and that K åre is sitting with his face turned away from her. She’s very conscious of her hands, her heart is thumping. The arteries in her neck are pulsing. She puts her hands to those arteries, holds them there. It feels like a pretty natural thing to do. She thinks that it all feels totally unreal. They’ve seen two crashes in one day. She thinks about the old lady with white hair who waved off the other women who came running—how determined she seemed.
* * *
But there it stops. She can’t think of anything more to think about. So she thinks about the planes they saw flying overhead, that they’d both thought the same thing, about all the people inside the plane they knew nothing about. This makes her think about the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers in New York. She thinks how strange it is, that the TV stations never seem to tire of it, of showing the exact moment when the planes plowed into the towers. She sits with her face to the window and thinks with relief that she now has something to think about. It’s almost beautiful, she thinks, the way they barrel in, it almost looks as though they’re just slipping through, as though there’s no resistance in the concrete, as though flying through a building is something one can easily do, the material all looks so incredibly soft. And it’s simply impossible to imagine that there’s anyone inside the planes, that there’s anyone inside the towers. Now and then she’s wondered if the nose of the plane remained intact when it crashed into the concrete, if the nose of the plane hit anyone and pushed anyone farther into the building, through all the walls and out the other side. It’s true, she thinks, she should be ashamed. Because it’s not particularly nice to think about things like that when it’s a matter of someone’s life and death. And then out of the blue she remembers a scene in Mrs. Dalloway: there’s a plane flying up in the air, and Mrs. Dalloway has gone out to buy flowers for a dinner she’s hosting later that evening, and Mrs. Dalloway looks up at the plane, and sees that it’s making letters with its vapor trail or whatever it is they use, and anyway, something is written in the sky, in the wake of the plane, and Mrs. Dalloway tries to interpret what she sees, and when the narrator then tells us what other people who see the plane are thinking, we discover that they all read what’s written in the sky differently. And it’s incredible, so incredibly beautiful, Sigrid thinks, because they try to decipher the message letter by letter, but then they all think that the trails look like different letters, and they say the letters out loud: K, R, or T … F, and they make different suggestions like “Glaxo,” “Creemo,” and “Toffee.” And it’s so lovely, Sigrid thinks, because you realize that what one person believes is an R, someone else thinks is an F, and so on. And that says everything about interpretation! How she, the reader, might also see a letter R, whereas someone else reads the letter as F, not seeing the small curve that makes F into R. And how the plane writing the letters has a purpose for writing what it’s writing, how it’s trying to write a particular word. And how the people who see the plane from the ground, and try to understand, manage to read something into its message, but perhaps not the meaning of the word it’s trying to write. And how, at the same time, there’s something claustrophobic about it all, that inside the plane there’s a pilot whom the people on the ground know nothing about, can’t see, in the same way that he can’t see straight into the brains of the people on the ground—since they’re covered by hair and crania—a few hundred feet down below. It’s the log again, the floating log, black and waterlogged and unthinking in the middle of an unthinking lake! It sends shivers down her spine. K åre offers a penny for her thoughts and with great relief she tells him what she’s been thinking about, first the Twin Towers and the apparent softness of the collision with concrete, and about the plane in Mrs. Dalloway that says everything there is to say about interpretation. She talks quickly and enthusiastically, and explains in detail about K and R and T and F, but when she looks at K åre, she sees that he has an odd expression on his face. So that’s what you think about in connection with the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers, K åre says, and she blushes. Interpretation? he says. Literature? The aesthetics of the apparent softness of the collision with concrete? Sigrid feels a painful knot in her stomach. You’ve misunderstood, she wants to say, that wasn’t what I meant, what I meant (and what about you, who goes on and on about how the one Bush has reflective stripes on his arms and the other doesn’t! But she doesn’t dare say that), what I meant was—
* * *
In an ideal world, Sigrid would say exactly what she thinks, that this is too much, that, all things being equal, they don’t really know each other, even though they have in some way touched each other deep down, through his book and her reading of his book, I mean, Sigrid would say, and yes, I’m ashamed that that’s what I think about. She wants to shout fuck. Who is he to come and line her up against the wall? What has she done to him, what’s his problem? But she just becomes smaller and smaller under his scornful gaze, and by the time he says well, one can think so many things, she’s so small that she almost can’t see him anymore, her fingers stretch up toward the wineglass that’s almost out of reach on the table and it nearly tips over the edge.
* * *
I don’t deserve that reaction, Sigrid says, eventually. There is silence between them in the caf é. They’re the only guests now, as the two old ladies, who were sitting below with a cup of coffee and piece of cake each, have left. The room feels airy, enormous, blue, full of high windows, and Sigrid is a guest with a very red face. It’s actually quite ridiculous that such a big, posh caf é should be so empty. The two waitresses behind the counter down below are standing talking to each other, they lean against the countertop behind them, with all the wineglasses on the shelf above and a mirror behind. A chandelier hangs from the ceiling, which in many ways resembles an astronomical body in abstract, geometric form, re-created with silver wires reaching out to become one enormous star, with tiny electric bulbs positioned at just the right distance from each other, so that the overall effect given by this astronomical body is in fact that of a beautiful, modern chandelier. That’s all there is in the room, other than a red-faced Sigrid and a K åre, who’s looking at her—what she’s just said is worthy of respect, and she grows again in his eyes. Okay, K åre says. Sorry. I think, he says, that I’m just a bit overwhelmed by you. At the same time that I’m thinking that you’re too good to be true. I’m having problems dealing with it. I guess I was just trying to pick holes in things. He shrugs, palms up. Not very nice. I’m sorry. I’m not too good to be true, Sigrid says, well, maybe a little. K åre laughs, he likes the fact that she’s funny and forthright! It makes him feel confident again, and again he takes her hands. I’m overwhelmed by you, he says, and looks at the table, and as he says it, he hears himself saying it, is overwhelmed by the sound of his saying “ I am overwhelmed by you,” the fact that he’s actually saying this to someone overwhelms him to the point that tears almost well up in his eyes, because it has to be true then, that he’s overwhelmed by someone, by her! And it’s all a bit much, really, he says. It doesn’t fit with my life. You don’t fit. And yet you’re so right. Well, now I’ve said it. Strange, isn’t it? K åre says, and looks back at the table. But I’m overwhelmed by you too, Sigrid says, and hears how stupid it sounds when she says it, partly because she’s saying exactly what he said, but also because these are words she seldom says, because they’re too big for her mouth, and when she says them her voice gets all distorted and awkward as it tries to sneak past those words. It’s all very strange, K åre says. What do you think we should do about us? K åre asks. Become lovers, Sigrid says. He snorts and laughs. Right, that would be simple enough, he says. I’ve already got a girlfriend, K åre says. Or had, we’ve kind of split up. Kind of, Sigrid says. Kind of, yes, K åre repeats. Sigrid looks out the window. It somehow doesn’t matter that he kind of has a girlfriend. He’s sitting here now with her hands in his. She has to win him over. We could kiss, Sigrid says. K åre looks at her. He likes the fact that she surprises him like this! Or maybe we can just hold hands, she says, since we already are. K åre strokes her hands with his thumbs. Yes, you’re right, K åre says. You’ve got lovely hands, K åre says, I’m just inspecting them. Ah, Sigrid says, and even though she thinks this is possibly the biggest clich é one could use when sitting in a romantic situation holding someone’s hands, she feels giddy and in love. K åre wants to kiss her. It would be so easy! Then it would all be over and he would go back to being himself. And he could start anew, again. Then Wanda and all her chaos would finally be a closed chapter, and he could start on an unwritten one. Not least, he could admit to himself that he was capable of it, that he could hurt the person he loved most. That’s just the way he was. And by admitting precisely that, and by kissing Sigrid, he could perhaps move on, K åre thinks as he looks down at Sigrid’s hands.
