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

  I think I heard the expression from Havstein first, and I’ve seen it in numerous books since, hunting through the reference books I’ve found, but I’m still looking for a satisfactory explanation. Havstein called them trigger factors, minute, dormant firecrackers in the brain that can go off without warning given the right stimulus, so we’re never the same again. We all have them, and they’re each differently coded, so it’s impossible to know what might set them off before it’s too late. As yet we still have no possibility of un-experiencing what happens in our lives. The majority get through their lives without ever setting off these electrical mechanisms that cause us to think so differently, turning us into totally different people than we once were, most of us will experience tiny shifts at worst, a spark or two that’s quickly extinguished without recourse to anything more dramatic than a short period of sick leave, half a year on Prozac, a weekend on Valium, or with good friends who are there when needed. Most people never give a thought to the giant catastrophe that might hit and cause the brain’s ultimate meltdown. But for some of us, these trigger mechanisms are more sensitive, more vulnerable to impulses, and eventually they go off, one, or all of them simultaneously. It can happen at any moment, we can be on the bus, on the way home or to work, we can be in the supermarket waiting for the new checkout girl to remember the code for celery so we can pay and leave, go home and make dinner. It can happen when we’ve ignored warnings for weeks, going steadily downhill, after we’ve received complaints that our work’s not up to scratch, we’re not doing a good enough job, we’re arriving late, missing meetings, staying at home, curtains drawn, TV on. Or it can come like an explosion from nowhere, when we’re with a best friend, and we’re in our prime, only twenty-three and we’ve gone to the Faroese National Gallery, and we stand in the first room, before Samuel Joensen Mikines’s greatest painting, Home from a Funeral, which was when it happened to Anna, that was the moment those microscopic electrical charges went off in her brain, so small that even nanotechnology would seem clumsy in comparison, Anna stood in front of Mikines’s dark painting and exploded, an event totally invisible to her friend and probably to herself, but she noticed it when she got home, by the time she got to bed that night she knew it had happened, and for Anna the damage was irreversible. Since then she’s never dared go closer than five hundred feet to the gallery, never looked at a single work by Mikines again. Because sadly, it isn’t over when these triggers are released. In the tiny little craters in which the damage is done, new triggers are formed, with even more intricate release mechanisms, and even if you recover, if everything gets sorted out, if things go well, there’ll always be something there, ready to return, to be released by either the same or some new factor, and then they’ll explode again, the firecrackers you never asked for, this time they’ll spin out of the initial crater, and out to new places where it’ll be even harder for the emergency crew to reach you in time. So you live on your guard, avoiding the triggers you think you know, like a migraine patient avoiding red wine, chocolate, or whatever, you avoid the situation you’ve begun to fear, friends you no longer understand, your workplace, your apartment, the sound of helicopters, large crowds, or something as innocent as a Faroese painting from the first half of a long-gone century.

  It’s strange. But that’s how it is.

  I spent a lot of time thinking it over. About what might have caused them to fall ill. NN. Palli. Anna. Carl. A stupid attempt at self-diagnosis, there’s no way around it, and I’m probably not the first to have tried it, but I believe that if only I can find out what went wrong with the others, I’ll be able to work out how to repair myself, classic really, the patient who thinks he can escape if only he dons the doctor’s coat. And I’d been thinking about that since I sat there that first evening with the files, and read about Anna. The National Gallery. Its pictures. It was time to see them. If a painting could make you ill, I wanted to see what it looked like.

  No, that’s incorrect.

  I burned to see that picture.

  So, anyway: I secretly went to the National Gallery with Carl one Sunday when it was raining and the fog hung particularly heavily over the islands and there wasn’t much else to do. I don’t remember what we said to the others, so they wouldn’t want to come with us, maybe I got Carl to say we were going fishing, something we did often, for hours at a time, nobody but Carl ever wanted to go. Yes, it’s likely we said we were off fishing. But the fish we were after were for looking at, not to be caught or grilled or eaten.

  We parked the car in the back and walked around the building looking for the entrance, but changed our minds halfway since it seemed we were on the wrong path, we turned and tried walking the other way, it wasn’t easy to find the front of this place, we managed to get drenched in no time and ran the last few feet before finally locating the entrance and going in through the glass doors where we were met by a receptionist who sat in defensive mode at the register, barely able to see us over the edge of the counter. We must have looked rather forlorn standing there, with steam rising from our jackets and gazing around, not knowing quite what to do, because the girl behind the counter immediately sat bolt upright and asked if she could help us at all.

  “We just wanted to see some paintings,” I answered, wiping the rain from my face. “Mikines. You have his paintings here, don’t you?”

  Her face lit up. “Yes, of course!”

  She crept down behind the counter again, prepared two tickets, twenty kroner each.

  “You’ve been unlucky with the weather today, haven’t you?” We looked as though we’d been underwater.

  “We left our umbrella at home,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, nothing. But it’s a nice day indoors.”

  “Yes. It’s nice in here.”

  She gave us our tickets, then emerged from behind the counter, crossed over to the information stand and took a couple of pamphlets, and now I saw there was nothing wrong with her height, it was the counter that was odd, and I thought how embittered the carpenter must have been to build such a creation.

  We were given two pamphlets about Mikines, one in English and one in Danish, which she placed solemnly in our hands.

  “Samuel-Joensen-Mikines-is-the-father-of-Faroese-painting,” she said mechanically. “It-is-impossible-to-overestimate-his-importance. Many-people-consider-him-to-be-the-first-professional-painter-in-this-country. Mikines-was-born-in-1906-and-died-in-1979.”

  We thanked her, bowed and waved at her with our pamphlets as we wandered into the gallery, and she padded back to reception and was gone.

  As we rounded the corner and disappeared out of view, Carl suddenly turned to me.

  “Mattias? Is there something wrong?”

  “No. What do you mean?”

  “Why didn’t you want the others to know anything about where we were going? Why did we lie to them?”

  “It’s Anna,” I said. “Anna was here and saw this painting shortly before she fell ill.”

  “And so? What does that have to do with us?”

  “Don’t you ever think it’s strange that things turn out as they do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”

  So I didn’t tell him about the things I’d read about Anna in her file, the dripping wet sailors who’d stepped out of the picture and into her house for years. I said nothing, not even to Carl, since I was uncertain he’d be interested, but I made it clear he mustn’t tell her where we’d been, nor the others, she’s got problems with this gallery, was all I said, and Carl nodded, best to keep it quiet. He had no problem with that, was probably only happy to keep well away from any problems, while I, I couldn’t stop thinking there were connections out there, there had to be.

  We found Mikines on our first attempt, hardly difficult, his paintings looked like nothing else hanging there, I stood before a self-portrait and looked at Carl.

  “Does it say anything in there about the picture?�
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  “Let’s have a look,” he leafed through the pamphlet.

  “This self-portrait is from 1933, right?”

  I bent down toward the little white label.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  We stared at the picture. It was Mikines in person. It was dark. His face almost melted into the picture, and it looked as though he was thinking about things he shouldn’t think about.

  “Apparently Mikines was often ill, it was difficult for him to get a proper education since it was constantly interrupted, and it says here that it was in periods of good health that he tried to paint, but it wasn’t until an international visitor came to the islands that things opened up for him. Mikines was seventeen or eighteen when a Swedish bird painter called William Gislander visited the island. It says that Mikines grew totally obsessed with this man’s work, and literally followed Gislander everywhere that summer, collecting all Gislander’s used tubes of paint and using the leftovers for his own attempts, and he soon began working with a definite aim. He was accepted by the Academy in Copenhagen in the following year.”

  “Right,” I answered, walking on down the line of self-portraits, each painting darker than the previous, each face more anguished. Carl read my thoughts and dipped into the pamphlet again, no need for a tour with him at my side, a born tour guide.

  “It says here Mikines’s work can be divided into roughly two periods. The dark and the light color-wise, that cover, among other works, the well-known whale slaughter paintings. His dark period begins in 1934 when two boats were wrecked on their way home from a fishing trip near Iceland. Forty-three men are lost, among them nine from Mykines, which naturally hit everybody in the tiny community terribly hard. Added to which his father died that summer too, bringing the dark undertone, which became characteristic of all his paintings for the next ten years. The year after the accident and his father’s death, he began work on the large canvas, Home from a Funeral and …”

  I recognized the title immediately. Anna. It was Anna’s picture.

  “Where’s that picture? Is it hanging here?”

  “Yes, it should be here—”

  “I think we should find it right away.”

  He looked at me uneasily. “Yeah, okay. No skin off my nose. Come on.”

  We continued down the hall, took a right turn, into the biggest room, a large, square, white room, into which light poured through a glass roof, hitting the wooden floor and the wall in front of us, a gigantic picture, more than five feet tall, in a frame of what looked like old timber. This was the painting I wanted to see. Carl and I stood stock still in the middle of the room. It was the creepiest picture I’d ever seen. The paint was cracked, lines scraped in all directions, as though it had been dragged across several battlefields or transported over the sea in an open boat. It reminded me of Munch, but where his paintings and the angst they portrayed ought to be easy for us to identify with, considering our condition, this was something else. The angst encrusted in this paint was different, even more powerful, because there was no sickness in it, it was impossible to explain away. There was no fear here. Just an oppressive, monumental sorrow. It stood out of the painting like a deep, deafening thunder, and was at the same time frustratingly soundless. The painting showed eight people sitting huddled together astern a boat, forming an irregular pyramid. All dressed in black. Brownish-black. It seemed as though they rose up from a wave, and all that was visible behind them was a disturbed night sky of gray, and the sea, all in the same dark tones, the opposite of a Kodak moment. Their faces stared out at me bitterly, lozenge-shaped, oval faces with sharp edges that seemed to grow longer with each passing second, narrowed eyes, I felt the desire to ask their forgiveness, to tell them it wasn’t my fault, it was beyond my control, that there was nothing I could do to help them, but I said nothing, I sat on one of the seats in the middle of the room, unable to take my eyes from the canvas.

  Carl stood in front of the picture for a minute or two before boredom overtook him and he shrugged his shoulders. He moved to the end of the room with me in tow and continued on his own personal introduction to the artist’s life and art, with almost dogged determination.

  “Mikines’s-output-was-uneven-and-viewed-by-some-as-disjointed-but-this-has-to-be-viewed-in-the-light-of-his-numerous-long-hospital-stays-and-breaks-from-his-work.-For-long-periods-Mikines-also-drank-excessively-and-took-drugs-railroading-him-from-his-artistic-work.-The-word-schizophrenia-is-often-used-to-describe-his-mental-state-but-he-was-never-diagnosed-as-such.-However-he-oscillated-between-a-superiority-complex-to-overwhelming-feelings-of-inferiority,-and-is-recorded-as-saying-that-if-it-was-up-to-him-85-percent-of-his-paintings-would-be-recalled-and-destroyed-by-him-personally. We-must-be-thankful-this-didn’t-happen.”

  He looked at me for acknowledgement, but I was no longer following. My mind was elsewhere.

  “Should we go?” I said, walking swiftly toward the exit, with Carl on my heels, his nose still in the artist’s biography.

  “But listen to this, Mattias: Mikines had an appalling temper, and this was often a terrible burden to him. During his enforced stay in Denmark during the war, when all communication with the Faroes was broken, he joined the Danish Nazi party one evening, probably as a result of being drunk and excitable. But unlike Knut Hamsun, he woke up the next morning and regretted it, and immediately withdrew his membership. Do you think that bears any significance?”

  “No,” I answered. “No significance at all.”

  It was quiet in the car as we drove back home to Gjógv that afternoon. I kept it to myself, but a thought had taken root and wouldn’t shift. NN also came from Mykines. Was that somehow relevant? She wasn’t the only one from the island who’d had problems besides Mikines. Could I totally exclude the possibility that there was something in the air there, that the experience of loneliness there was more oppressive than elsewhere? Not entirely. And more, if one could be driven crazy just by looking at a painting, or by life on an island, or by taking buses, what other things might lurk behind every corner? How could one guard oneself when surrounded by such uncertainty? I hadn’t a clue, no idea what had triggered my problems, it could have been anything or nothing, Helle, the nursery, things that went farther back. But most of all, I was worried for the others, for their so-called well-being, it seemed that it took so little to tip the balance, and more than anything I wished I could talk with some of them about this, but that was impossible without tearing everything up from its foundations, without any guarantee of being able to put the pieces together again, I couldn’t even say anything to Havstein, as it would reveal I’d been snooping in his archives, and if I did that, we’d both have to tell each other everything, and I had no idea where I’d start or where I’d finish. There were so many things we didn’t know, and most of them would have been horribly painful to acknowledge.

  4

  Four days later NN died. On one of my days off. We were going to take the bus down to Hvitanes, NN, Carl, and I. I was going to show them the trees I’d planted, NN and I hadn’t taken a walk in our minimalist woods since I’d began working there, she’d barely been out of Gjógv of late, stayed in a lot. We were going to have a beer later, meet Havstein and the others in the evening. But Carl had changed his mind at the last moment, wanted to work for a couple of hours instead, come down to the harbor on the late afternoon bus, he had a new idea for something to make, so it was just NN and me. She went on ahead, I was going to change into a lighter jacket, she walked up to the bus shelter, sat on the bench, and waited.

  Then, as I come out of the Factory door I hear the bus coming, I hurry across the road keeping an eye on it as it makes its way downhill toward us, I round the corner and call to NN, but can’t see her, until she suddenly comes into view, she takes a couple of steps out of the shelter, at the same moment the bus driver tries to brake, and she’s hit from behind, crumples up, disappears under the bus.

  Hydraulics.

  Brakes as the bus finally stops.

>   Her arms don’t move.

  The bus driver stares straight ahead.

  The sound of my shoes on asphalt as I run to her.

  Droplets of rain hit my face as I frantically try to pull her out from under the bus, one of her hands is under the front wheel, the bus driver has to compose himself before starting the bus and inching forward to free her.

  The bus moves. She screams.

  Blood floods from the almost torn off hand. From her belly. Panic. Puking. Panic. Puking.

  The bus driver is sobbing and rips the sleeve from his jacket, ties it around her wrist.

  The passengers sit motionless in the bus, looking down into the floor.

  She screams, then she is suddenly still. I hold her, telling her it’ll all be all right, you’ll get help soon, just hold on, be patient.

  I shout and Carl comes running, his hands full of wool, we drive her in our car to the hospital in J.C. Svabosgøta, Tórshavn, because we have no time to wait for an ambulance, I watch her in the mirror all the way, talk to her, Carl holds her, tries to keep her conscious, comforts her, ties more fabric around her arm, her belly.

  By the time we arrive NN is already wandering carefully through coma’s vague gardens, and they operate on her immediately as we sit outside in the hallway waiting, we call Havstein, get him to come, and there we sit, waiting, while NN is operated on, and we think everything will be all right, that we got here fast enough.

  NN doesn’t die that day, even though it feels that way, she lies in the hospital for almost six weeks, and when it’s over, much has changed, trees have grown, and I’m on the way home.

  Quiet days at the Factory after NN was gone.

  We gave each other a wide berth and got nothing done, it was hard keeping the simplest routines going. We got up as usual, went to work when we had to, came home at the usual times. But the simplest things, the meals, evening activities, were all absent, fell apart. We had difficulties talking about it with each other, everybody reacted so differently and nobody knew where to begin. Carl stayed in the Factory mainly, continued from where he’d left off on the day she’d been run over, as though he could change events by pretending nothing had happened. I sat with him in his room a lot, but he rarely talked about her, changed the subject every time I broached it.