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

  “Do you think what I do is any more sensible?” I began. “I make gardens for strangers, in midwinter, planting flowers that’ll freeze to death in just days.”

  “No, of course not, but for you it’s just an in-between thing. Sooner or later you’ll go back to Norway, you’re just using this to get over a relationship that you knew in your heart of hearts was over years ago, and now you’re here because—well—why are you still here now, really? Because you’re a coward. You’re here because you’re a coward, Mattias, nothing but a coward. You’re not so sick or tired that you need to be here anymore, you’re here because you’re too much of a coward to go back and pick up where you left off, for fear it’ll all go to hell again.”

  A coward.

  She’d said it four times.

  So it had to be right.

  “The difference is, Mattias,” she continued, “that I can suggest things you could do, I can imagine you working as something other than as a gardener, I have no problem seeing you working with kids in a nursery, being a musician, a builder, a teacher, whatever you want, I can imagine you doing just about any job. Now, tell me: what job can you see me doing?”

  There was quiet at the table. I thought about it. I never had before, not about that. And I didn’t dare to say it straight, that I had no idea, that I’d never imagined her doing anything else at all.

  I thought for a long time.

  I said nothing.

  Stared into the tabletop, heard the seconds pick up their jackets and leave demonstratively through the door behind us.

  “Maybe it’s not true that everybody’s good at something. Deep down you haven’t even thought about it, have you? So long as the world around you behaves as you expect it to, you’re safe, aren’t you? So long as you can be useful? So long as you can be one of those damned cogs you keep talking about. Well, why don’t you want that for others? Do you want to be the only cog? That’s cowardly, Mattias.”

  Cowardly again.

  I didn’t answer, wished I was far away, crossing the desert with nobody watching.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said.

  “I—,” I began, but she brushed me off, gave a heavy sigh and drank her coffee.

  “Just don’t,” she said curtly, and the café noise of the customers and the stereo in the corner drowned out our silence, the unsaid things, and neither of us spoke again until our cups were empty, until we’d walked out to the car, until we’d got in and were on our way back and things fell back into place and we started talking to each other again, hugs in the car and sunshine from nowhere.

  I think that was the first time we came close to quarreling, and during the weeks that followed we had a few days like that, when she was miserable about not having seen enough, done enough, when she’d wonder what she could do with herself, and I didn’t know if this was a sign she was on the road to total recovery at last, or if it was the start of a relapse. But even though on that first day she made it clear she was angry with me for letting her see I hadn’t given a thought to what she might do with her life, these moments of anger, these quarrels generally revolved around her own disappointment in herself, and the fact she didn’t know what to do with herself. And they were also about the frustration that inevitably had to come after Carl had entered the frame, because even though I’d liked him from the instant I’d brought him in from the ocean, even though I soon realized he’d fallen in love with NN and that it was probably deeply mutual, there was no doubt it had disrupted the balance between us, and the days were an accordion, nobody knew who played it, but NN and I were pushed together and pulled apart from one another as the music went on playing and everything was all right, really.

  Because NN and I didn’t become lovers, we didn’t sleep in the same bed, didn’t stand kissing as the sun set and the whales sang on command in the coves, it was Carl that found that side of her a couple of weeks later and I was pleased, pleased for them, it gave me some sort of pride even, I know Anna’s shoulders relaxed a bit when she saw them together and what was going on. When it came to Carl and me, we’d gotten along well from the beginning and as the year passed he became my closest friend, we had a totally different relationship from the one I’d had with Jørn, who slipped slowly away from me, day by day, despite my hope that he wouldn’t, and in a way, it was thanks to Carl that NN and I became such good friends. Still, it took time to get used to it, to reconcile myself to the new situation, and now and again it was a bit painful too, when I let it in.

  They were altogether strange times in the Factory at Gjógv that winter. A totally different feel from everything six months before. And despite the fact that the mood was lighter after we’d received our gift from the ocean, I couldn’t quite shake off the question that NN had posed, why was I still here, why hadn’t I left for home long ago? I thought a lot about it. Thought about how I still had nothing to do in Stavanger. No friends who sat and missed me anymore. Not even Jørn, I thought. I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to stay. And I thought about it until I could fathom the reason, and I remember being surprised when I understood it. I think it even scared me. I wasn’t going back home because I’d begun to grow dependent on these people. I’d grown too fond of them to leave. And then there was my being needed. Havstein needed me, I just didn’t know why. Carl needed all he could get. And NN needed me. But the best or worst thing of all was that I needed them even more than they needed me. So I stayed. At ease, sir. I did my thing, turned the little cogs, those I could reach, helped where I could. Post-psychiatry’s grand tourist.

  And then the day came that we’d all been waiting for and that I dreaded perhaps more than anybody, because it put my resolve to stay to the test, and now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can say it wasn’t unnatural that I disliked it so strongly, because it was the beginning of the end, proof that nothing lasts, and that nothing you take for granted, everything you love and or that makes you happy, everything you spend time and energy to get, will all be taken inexorably away from you. It’s just a question of how long you’re allowed to borrow it.

  One Friday afternoon, right at the beginning of March, I stood on the steps and rang Óli and Selma’s doorbell, and the instant Sofus opened the door to let me in I knew things weren’t quite right, even though he didn’t say it at first. I’d been coming around two days a week since Christmas, just as I’d promised, I’d spent time with Sofus so that he wouldn’t have to spend so much time alone, we’d sat in his room playing computer games, or I’d helped him with his homework, we’d spent all January assembling a model he’d gotten for Christmas, a space shuttle, to my delight, an exact model of the Columbia with miniature astronauts who could be glued into their seats in the cockpit and tiny stickers for the wings. NASA. The shuttle was hanging from the ceiling by a fishing line when I came into his room, I gave it a little tap as I passed by so that it sailed aimlessly back and forth for a moment, in useless circles that went nowhere. Building the shuttle had been a success, we’d had a great time together during those days, bent over the plastic pieces, with stinking tubes of glue in our hands and three table lamps clamped to the desk to give us a good working light. I’d been in charge of diagrams and instructions, Sofus had been the glue-boss, the builder. Now that we had a taste for blood we’d gotten ourselves another model, it lay on his bed, still in its plastic packaging. I sat on the chair at his desk and Sofus sat on the edge of the bed, lifted up the model and studied the box.

  “It’s from the Apollo 17 expedition,” I said, and pointed at the box in his hands that showed a picture of a lunar rover with a big parabolic antenna at the back. Lunar Rover Vehicle, it said on the pack, white writing on a black background of the universe.

  He nodded.

  “That was the last expedition of the Apollo Program,” I said. “It was all over after it. People began to lose interest in the moon.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not easy to say why. Maybe because there was so much wrong on earth that needed puttin
g right.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Did you know, by the way, that I was born on the same day that they landed on the moon for the first time?”

  “Is that true?”

  “Yep. At roughly the same moment.”

  “Imagine if it was their fault you were born. The men on the moon.”

  “You never know. But I doubt it.” And then I added:

  “But it probably means nothing. Did you know that the astronauts played golf on the moon too?”

  “Is that true?”

  “Completely true.”

  “Why did they do that?”

  “For fun, I suppose. And the golf ball, well, it just disappeared out into space. It never stopped.”

  “How many people are there on the moon now?”

  “There’s nobody there now. Just lots of stuff they’ve left behind. Buzz Aldrin’s moon boots, and other things. But twelve people have been up there in all.”

  “Those twelve people must have been very famous.”

  “They were, for a while at least.”

  Sofus fell silent, for a long time.

  “Mattias?”

  “Yes?”

  “How big is space?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “But pretty big. Millions and millions of times bigger than the Faroe Isles.”

  “If I stood at one end of outer space and you stood at the other end, and then we began to walk toward each other, do you think we’d ever find each other?”

  “Maybe if we walked long enough. And had good shoes.”

  He pondered over that awhile, tried to picture it, but couldn’t, it was impossible.

  I nodded toward the model. “Should we build it, or what?”

  Sofus shrugged his shoulders.

  “There’s no point. We’ll never finish it anyway.”

  “What do you mean? Come on. You can be the glue-boss.”

  “I’m moving next week.”

  So that was it. I’d been waiting for it almost. But I hadn’t expected to feel so sad about it.

  “Is that certain? Where to?”

  “Tórshavn. Dad’s got a new job.” He flung the box aside and lay back against the wall.

  “But that’s good, surely. You’ll probably make tons of friends. There are lots of kids your age in Tórshavn, you know.”

  “I’m okay now. Here.”

  I couldn’t contradict him.

  “And you’re here with me,” he added.

  “It’ll all work out. Things always do. I think you’ll have a really good time down there. There are girls and everything there, I’ve heard.”

  “Mom and Dad said we might go to Denmark in the summer and visit Óluva.”

  “Sounds good. Are you looking forward to that?”

  He looked at the wall, exaggerated the gesture designed to demonstrate that he was practically indifferent. “Yeah.” Then he grew serious again, stopped trying to be more grown-up than he was, he was just Sofus, and anxious.

  “Will you forget me too, when I leave? Like the spacemen?”

  I looked at him.

  “I’ve never forgotten them,” I answered. “I still remember them. So I won’t forget you either.”

  “You can have our address in Tórshavn, if you want. Mom must know it.”

  “Of course I will. You know, I’ve got Buzz Aldrin’s address too, in the USA.”

  “Have you ever sent him a letter?’

  “No.”

  “Promise to send me a letter if you get my address.”

  “Of course I will.”

  I talked a bit with his parents when I left that day, thanked Selma for the delicious meals I’d had on my visits to Sofus, and got their address in Tórshavn, thanked them for making me feel useful, talked with Óli, about his new office job down in town. Talked about Gjógv. And we agreed it was good that at least some people stayed, they’d have preferred to stay themselves, but it was impossible, there was no money in it, and things would get worse, he thought, if the Faroese went ahead with their demands for independence from Denmark. And so we talked. About trivial things and the political ideologies that dogged our country, nothing ever changed, and I finally told him how I’d taken him up on his offer, how I’d borrowed his boat, and I told him about New Year’s Eve and the person we’d hauled from the sea, and I could see Óli was pleased that I’d told him, that we’d used his boat that night, that it had been possible to save a life simply because Óli lived there and owned a boat, that when it came to it every bit helped and everything linked together. He smiled:

  “Use it as much as you want. I’ll leave it here. Just in case.”

  “Won’t you take the boat with you?”

  “I hardly ever use it anyway. So I’ll leave it. It can be useful to have a boat.”

  But we never used it again. Didn’t touch it. The rowboat would lie in the harbor until the day we vanished for good.

  I shook his hand, thanked him and said goodbye, went out and down the steps. Then Óli opened the front door and shouted after me.

  “Why don’t you sing anymore, by the way? I haven’t heard you in forever.”

  “Because things are on the way up,” I answered and left, and I’d thought of showing up on Wednesday the following week to say goodbye to Sofus, to Selma, I stood in the Factory kitchen watching them pack the final things into the big moving van, but I was beaten to it, by the time I’d put on my shoes and gone out into the courtyard the van had already gone, the birds had flown, and Gjógv had three less inhabitants.

  I had gone on until March with the work Havstein had set in motion, planting gardens for people I didn’t know, and then one day, God help me, a journalist called, desperate to write an article about this stupid Norwegian who was planting gardens for people in the middle of winter. I wondered how they’d found out about it down there in the editor’s offices of Sosialurin or Dagbla∂i∂, Havstein obviously must have tipped them off, thinking it was good for me to see it was useless to hide away, that it was better to take the bull by the horns, as he said.

  Fuck no, I said.

  Forget it.

  No way.

  Snowball in hell.

  But when you’re living in post-psychiatric care, decisions are not yours to make, and on the following Monday I sat in the car next to a hungry journalist from the biggest newspaper on the Faroes, I hadn’t come up with any complicated strategies for the interview, merely decided to make myself impossible, I was determined to fly over the cuckoo’s nest.

  I insisted, among other things, on having the car radio turned all the way up while I drove, so that Útvarp Føroya blasted out of the windows, booming against mountain walls on the bends in the road down toward Funningur. He objected valiantly at first, but then I told him, very seriously, that I was allergic to the sound of rubber against asphalt, and after that it was fine, totally fine, he must have thought I was totally insane, exactly my intention.

  I drove down toward Vestmanna, taking the longest route, with the stereo so loud the whole time that the journalist could do nothing but sit in silence next to me, fumbling with the camera in his lap, as though he might, at any moment, take the world’s greatest snapshot of me. And as we passed Streymnes and he was still sitting with his camera at the ready, I turned the volume down on the radio.

  “No Kodak moment today,” I said.

  “Sorry?”

  I turned the sound up again, even louder this time, rolled the window down, still in Streymoy, as the ice-cold air blasted into the car and I pretended everything was normal, while the journalist made himself small in his seat, not daring to protest.

  I was on my way to plant a garden for some wealthy person by the name of Magnusson, just outside Vestmanna, he’d made his money from fishing, and I didn’t know why on earth he was so desperate to have a miniature Japan in his garden, but that was what he’d asked for, I’d received clear instructions on both contents and design, Havstein had helped me order the goods, a time-consuming process in
itself. So Japan it would be. Maybe this Magnusson had known this would get Sosialurin interested. Maybe he wanted to be interviewed and photographed, so he could saunter down to the shop the next day, buy a newspaper, take it home, and make a show for his family of working through the paper from the front page onward, until it grew increasingly difficult to resist leafing through to the last pages where the interview would be. And when he finally got that far, to page thirty, and saw himself standing there smiling beside his bonsai tree, he’d spend just seconds skimming the interview before uttering an indifferent well, well, and leaving the paper on the table, hoping his wife and children would pick it up and read it. And then that evening he’d go out to the bin where the newspaper had been thrown, take it back in and cut the interview out, put it in a plastic sleeve with a dark cover entitled Magnusson’s interviews, articles etc. Then later he’d take this one clipping, copy it, and put it in a file, in case the original should go missing.

  I pulled into the driveway of Magnusson’s big house and turned off the radio, rolled the windows up and got out to open the trunk and back door, started to take out the plants and equipment that I’d squeezed in to make enough space. The journalist hung around me like an abandoned child and was clearly uncertain whether he should start his interview with me now or wait, and for a moment I wondered if I should ask Mr. Magnusson for a saucer of warm milk and somebody to stroke my journalist passenger’s fur while I worked.

  I felt bad for a moment and stretched my hand out to him, gave my name and presented myself politely.

  “Olaf Ludvig Bjarnason,” answered the journalist.

  “So, Olaf Ludvig, do you have a strong pair of arms?”

  He looked at me. Mr. Olaf Ludvig didn’t know what to say.

  “Do you think you could take those slabs?” I said, pointing at the big slabs of rock in the boot. “Come on.”

  We walked up to the house, myself in the lead, Olaf Ludvig stomping after.

  Magnusson was a nice man.

  Without a doubt.

  Dressed in a Japanese kimono as he was, one didn’t quite know what to expect.