Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? Read online

  So we drank more wine, our insides turned red and we found each other in that enormous room, snuck closer on the sofa. Ennen put more Cardigans on, it had already been light outside for a long time, sharp sunlight through the windows, a pair of indolent puffins made a few cautious rounds outside, but gave up, thought it was too early, flew back and went back to sleep. I sat here among these people, yet I’d begun to sink away from them. I thought about what I’d do next, how long I could be here, what I’d do afterward when autumn came, when my money was used up. There really weren’t many alternatives left, almost none. And I’m not sure I liked any of them.

  “It was a collective decision to let you stay here,” said Havstein suddenly, and a shock went through me. “I wanted you to know that. We’ve talked a lot about it. There’s no reason for you to go back now.”

  “There’s not a lot to go back to,” I said. I thought about Jørn, apart from during the weeks before we’d left, we’d barely seen each other in the last years. The occasional evening, a few hours once or twice a month, Jørn was busy with his life, so much to do, things were going in the right direction for him and I’d never wanted to stand in his way. And my parents, they’d miss me, of course, my visits, I knew Father would, he’d be sad that I no longer stopped by, that I no longer stood in the hallway unexpectedly, ready to hear the latest news, to discuss some event or other on the news, to stand in the garage helping him change to winter tires, or to assemble that new IKEA cupboard that Mother just had to have. I was going to miss them, and it was a strange feeling, realizing that the only people waiting for me back where I came from were my parents, and they’d wait for me whatever I did, forever tuned into that station, the frequency of loss.

  “But I’ve got a flat in Stavanger,” I said.

  “Yes, but it’s almost empty,” said Anna. “Can’t you give it up, get somebody to pick your things up?”

  And of course I could. There was almost nothing left there. Barely a cracker. And I wondered if one could do something like that, to be rid of everything one had, not to stop, but to return to Go, collect $200 and start again.

  “Perhaps,” I said.

  “Stay here,” said Ennen. “We think you should stay.”

  I sat saying nothing for a while.

  “All I have is the money in my wallet,” I said.

  Havstein looked at Anna. Anna looked at Ennen. Ennen looked at Havstein. They each looked at each other. Huey, Dewey, and Louie. I was Donald and understood nothing.

  “What’s your relationship to sheep?”

  “A natural one,” I answered.

  “Then we’ve got the perfect job for you.”

  And that was how I got the job, how I came to be Mattias, souvenir maker. Of handmade wooden sheep, covered in glued-on wool. No two alike, which is why everybody wanted to take them home, tourists, Icelanders who wanted to take a symbol back to their fatherland, proof of how the Faroe Islands were still behind them in every way, the Faroese, the people that fought for independence from Denmark, or not, and that went to bed at night and thought about, or forgot the world beyond. Wooden sheep. I produced souvenirs until the grim reaper himself went soft and begged me to take a break. I got up early in the morning, ate breakfast with Havstein and Ennen. Anna and Palli had already left, Anna for the fish farm in Funningur, Palli for the quayside in Kollafjør∂ur. Leaving us to make sheep. The perfect futile activity. Went into the locker room I’d been in on the first day, changed into work clothes, not because we really needed to but because it gave us the feeling we were running a business, we were workers. Finally had a use for the overalls I’d come with. Havstein and I turned the wood, planed it, sawed it, carved and hammered until the animals were beautiful, supple and aerodynamic, the way they should be. The old fish filleting room had been turned into a planing mill, a workshop, an enormous room in the back of the Factory, the only area that still looked like a factory, white brick walls, winches and pulleys hanging from the ceiling, windows covered with shavings and dust, dead flies on the ledge. We packed the sheep into beautiful brown cardboard boxes made by an advertising agency down in Tórshavn that we visited once a week to get supplies. We got support from the state to keep production going, to keep Gjógv going, which was almost deserted now, and to keep us going. We got almost all our income from there. I had the impression it really didn’t matter what we made, that we’d have been subsidized for just about anything, the production of tree felling equipment, even, so long as we did something. How we did it was up to us, so long as we gave first aid. But then, you can sell anything, it’s only a matter of convincing the world it needs it. Bottled water for example. In Norway. Wooden sheep were just as good, they brought happiness to little children and souvenir hunters. With state subsidy.

  August and September came and went before I’d even registered it, the nonexistent trees lost their leaves, and I spent my days in the workshop with Havstein and Ennen, producing wooden sheep and putting them carefully in their tourist friendly packaging, trying not to think about what I was doing, that it was meaningless, that I was contributing nothing of import. Late in the afternoon, Anna and Palli would return, and we’d eat dinner together, they were good times, and gradually, day by day, I began to thaw, I was Ötzi the iceman discovered in the Alps after so many years, and I’d waited so long for this, drank it all in and tried to float more lightly between rooms with each day.

  I hold out until one day in October. Then everything comes to a stop. The tape gets screwed up again. Haven’t gone out of my room for several days. I don’t know why. I’m not eating. I dream about Helle. I dream about plants, about the nursery, and in my dreams I’m the only one at work, the only one who comes in that day. And there’s so much to do, so many plants to be delivered. So little time. The clocks wind themselves forward on the walls. The hands scrape the metal surface as they spin. The door into the storeroom bulges outward, threatening to burst open. The storeroom is completely overfilled. I can’t get through my list. I’m behind time. Papers piled high on the counter. Orders. Reservations. I start from the sitting room. Lift the first pile of papers. Open the door to the storeroom. The plants come tumbling out, cover the entire floor of the shop. The clocks race on the walls. I fill the car to the brim, sit in the car, and the plants start dividing, multiplying themselves. They fill the whole shop, pressing up against the display windows. Bursting through. Breaking the walls of the building. So that glass and wood and steel and bricks rain over the car, smashing the window screen, denting the hood, scraping the paint. It smells like gasoline. And I drive away from the nursery, up to the first nursing home on the list. I run in. Run down the corridors. Bang on the door. Open it. Enter. But the rooms are all empty, the patients are already dead, taken away, and I have a car full of flowers nobody needs. I stand outside one of the nursing homes, feeling lost, my hand on the door handle. I don’t know what to do. Which is when I realize my legs are cold. Wet. I look down. I am up to my knees in water. The sea has begun to rise. It rises to my waist. I open the car door, get in, but the motor won’t start. Utterly dead. Just get to see the tidal wave raging toward the car, tearing people and houses with it as it goes, I wake up as the car turns over and the windows smash.

  I’ve shut myself in again. Nobody comes up anymore. I don’t know why. Haven’t seen Havstein for days. Perhaps I’ve asked to be left in peace. I don’t know. Haven’t eaten. Am awake at nights. Tiptoe out, fill my Jolly bottle with water from the bathroom tap and go back to my room. I miss the anonymity. I miss being unwanted. I miss myself. I’m out of sorts. I’d foreseen this somehow. That things wouldn’t go so well. I had thirteen years to wipe out. Nobody’s got an eraser that big.

  But then, it doesn’t last as long as the first time. By the fourth day I’m beginning to see the contours of myself in the mirror. My stomach aches. But I’m still here, still living here.

  I should call home. At least send a card. To my parents. Give some sign of life. For my own sake, if nothing else. Confi
rm my own existence.

  Day five. It’s dark in my room. My sweater sticks to my skin. My socks stink, and are impossible to pull off. It’s raining. I haven’t been out of my room for five days. I don’t know what I’m going to say. I can hear Ennen in the kitchen below, with the others. She’s laughing, and when she laughs, the others do too. They’re drinking beer, I can hear the cans being opened, a sporadic pfff and a schlup as they try to catch the beer that runs over the rim. Ennen has put the Cardigans on, the Life album, I will never know, cause you will never show, sings Nina Persson, and I can hear Ennen singing to it, C’mon and love me now and I’m struck by how, for a moment, Ennen’s voice blends with Nina’s, and then after, a verse goes off on its separate path.

  I get up in the end. I decide quite suddenly, get up, stand upright. Pull off my socks, my sweater, go out into the bathroom, take a shower. I stand in the shower and turn the water on, ice-cold at first, in seconds my whole body stiffens, but it wakes me up, I come to, and slowly but surely I let the water get hotter and hotter, until the steam drapes itself softly around the room, and on the walls. I dress, clean clothes, new socks. I open the door, after five days, go down the stairs and into the hallway, come into view in the doorway to the kitchen. I go over to the table, sit down in a vacant chair, say nothing. Open a beer that’s put in my hands, drink. Listen to the conversation as it goes back and forth over the table. Havstein turns toward me and says: “We knew you’d turn up sooner or later.” And then I start talking again. And from that moment on those two breakdowns will be something I scarcely remember in detail, a vague memory, a barely visible mark on a page.

  “Mattias?”

  “Yes?” I answered. Havstein stood in the doorway to the workshop one day, I was sitting in a chair at the table that was covered with half-finished wooden sheep, sitting with my hands in my lap, taking a break, thinking how it was out of season anyway.

  “Come with me.”

  Havstein disappeared into the living room and I slowly got up, nodded to Ennen who was reasonably absorbed in cutting up wool, signaled to her that I’d be back soon. Then followed Havstein out through the kitchen up the stairs and into his office. He sat in the chair in front of his desk. I was expecting anything and nothing.

  “I think I’ve found you a job.”

  “But I have a job, don’t I?”

  “I think this one’s more suitable.”

  “Really?” I answered thinking how anything, absolutely anything would be better than what I did now. Havstein leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and for a moment allowed the smoke to hang delicately over him in the light from the sun outside, like an enormous hat on his head, and I thought I ought to take up smoking, if no other reason than to have something to occupy myself.

  Havstein said: “I think it’s time for you to go back to gardening, Mattias.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “That I have an idea.”

  Then he told me about his plans, my plans. He’d talked to the local council about how they might get me out doing it again, and I wondered how it was that the local authorities were suddenly interested in me and that things should go well for me. Havstein had organized it, with the hole-punch-and-stamp brigade down in Tórshavn, a whole new career, my own one-man band. I was to be a gardener again.

  “A proper position,” said Havstein.

  “A proper position,” I repeated. Right.

  “I got you put on the system down there with the local council, which means you can stay here for awhile, as long as I’ve got reason to say it’s better for you here than elsewhere, for example in Norway.”

  “And have you got reason to say that?”

  “Well …”

  “But you’ve sorted it out anyway?”

  “I said you were insane.”

  The plan was for me to help Faroe Islanders who contacted the local council to get cheap labor, to fix up their gardens, establish winter gardens or plant hedges. I was meant to be a traveling salesman of green shrubs, on loan from the council and the Factory, the nutcase in the garden, loony on the lawn. It would bring customers, and I suppose that was what they’d planned, down in town where they sat by their hole-punchers, researching the number of sheets they could perforate in one go, when they gave the scheme the okay.

  So I agreed. I was glad to escape the monotony in the Factory, even though I’d enjoyed working with Ennen, listening to her humming through her entire Cardigans-record collection each day, the things we’d discussed when we were alone and everyone else was out.

  I was given my own contact in the council now who passed on jobs, addresses, and telephone numbers of clients to me. He ordered any plants and equipment I asked for, as long as I drove down to the quay in Tórshavn and fetched it myself. This meant we were given a new car at the Factory too, another used Subaru, clearly the car of choice in this country, and I had priority when it came to using it.

  Free gas.

  A small wage.

  I wasn’t about to complain.

  Havstein was pleased at my new existence, and plotted for how it might develop further, over time, how I might become a national treasure, how much I’d mean to the people I visited, the entire country might undergo a change, growing ever greener from my work and he probably had plans for Gjógv too, initially for the small flower beds outside the front door, around the Factory, and later perhaps I’d be able to make all Gjógv pretty and full of blooms, it was only a question of time in his head before the entire village would be transformed into a botanical garden with its inhabitants hidden among lilies of the valley and tulips. Tourists would stream into the village to see more than just the harbor. That evening I think perhaps Havstein pictured people moving up here because of my work, I didn’t have the heart or courage to say that wasn’t what I wanted, that I enjoyed my quiet, so I went along with it, played on his team, laid plans with him, which grew bigger and bigger, until weeds grew over the tables and we were lost in tall grass in the living room, had to use scythes to reach each other, and everything seemed perfect that evening, and on the following days, days you could have framed and hung on the wall, pointed at for visitors: Look, that was how things were for me then. Things were that good.

  Ennen was optimistic on my behalf too and began questioning me on all sorts of things she wondered about being a gardener. She wondered how much water roses needed, and why one should put sugar or lemonade in the water. She wondered why Emperor’s Happiness was called Emperor’s Happiness, which flowers went together and why, and where they came from, and why Holland was famous for its tulips and whether it had anything to do with people going about in clogs there, as she seemed to remember they did, and in the evening she’d often sit in the living room and read Garden Flowers in Color, which Havstein had given her. And when I came in and sat next to her, she’d smile knowingly before putting the book down and telling me what she’d just read. She even came to Tórshavn with me in the new car a couple of days later to pick up the plants I’d ordered for my first job for a family in Hvalvík. We sat in the car, and breathed in the aroma of our new used car as we waited for the boat carrying the goods to come alongside the west quay outside Bátafelagi∂, and I thought how Ennen’s gift was the way she interested herself in what the people she had around her were interested in. It wasn’t that she engaged with what the other person did for politeness’ sake. I think she did it because she wanted to find out why we did what we did, since what we did was somehow who we were, and that was her way of getting to know people, by searching to share the fascination that people she met had for the most disparate things. I’ve often thought it must have been exhausting. But perhaps it wasn’t. Maybe it was blindingly simple.

  And after I’d gotten back from that first job in Hvalvík, after Havstein and Ennen had stood outside the Factory to greet me as I drove back, after Palli and Anna had made supper, and we’d switched the TV on because we were waiting for some news item about something, I’ve forgotten what,
and after Ennen and Havstein and I had sat up in my room and I’d chatted on about Steve Martin’s stand-up records and said they weren’t particularly good, weren’t particularly funny, but that was what made them so brilliant because they were the sound of being second-best, and after we’d had one of our long conversations about why we all wanted to be in second place rather than first, and after Ennen had said that what she wanted most of all was Nina Persson’s autograph and I’d decided to try to get it, to write to her that very night on Ennen’s behalf, though it was January before I remembered it again, and then I forgot it the next day, by which time there were six instead of five at the Factory, and nobody had died yet in the new millennium, after Palli and Anna had joined us in my room for a beer before going to bed early as usual, and pretending they didn’t sneak into each other’s rooms at night to sleep together, after we’d sat huddled in my little room with the window open so Havstein could have a cigarette, and after he’d talked about how much he loved us all and how happy he was we were there with him and we’d admitted to ourselves and each other that we might never improve, let alone get away from the Factory, and that that was okay, that there was nothing wrong with that, and that there wasn’t anyone who could decide how things turned out, after everybody finally left my room, and I lay under the duvet and thought about the job I’d done, what I was going to do over the next few days, after that, I felt everything would work out all right in the end. Absolutely everything. And I was the certainest person in the world that night. Slept like a marmot in its burrow.

  The days came on an assembly line, almost identical and perfect on delivery, accompanied by a user manual in several languages and with ready-completed guarantees. We’d eat supper. Anna and Palli would sit in the living room while the three of us stayed in the kitchen, washed up, had some wine, when we’d bought it, or coffee. Havstein would still disappear off to his own room at some point, to sit and read all evening, or all night, for all I knew. I’d sit in my room most evenings, looking at the wall, looking out of the window. Go to bed early and tired, or as time passed I’d go to Ennen’s room, or more precisely, she’d come to mine, knock on the door, open it, and drag me out of my room into hers, her room was the farthest away in the southeasterly part of the first floor, the biggest room, light, crammed with old, surplus furniture, stacks and stacks of magazines along the walls, old dog-eared magazines from almost every corner of the world, all colors and shapes, a bookshelf on which she’d squeezed her stereo system and her four CDs, only the Cardigans, and at the back of her room another door, into her bedroom, a solitary mattress on the floor, a wooden chair next to it, an alarm clock on it, nothing more. I don’t quite know how it was Ennen who ended up taking care of me most in the evenings, why we started sitting together like this, up in her room, it just turned out like that, and they were wonderful evenings, among the best. Anna and Palli often disappeared into deep conversations together, they worked outside the Factory too, and met more people than I did. Perhaps Ennen and I felt like younger siblings, doing our best to occupy ourselves without being in the way. Or maybe such things are coincidental, incomprehensible, impossible to change.