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

  “Come on, we’re going on a trip.”

  “Now?” I said and laughed. I was in no state for a trip. “Are you sure we shouldn’t wait a bit? Until tomorrow morning or next week or some other time?”

  “Nope, come on, you’ll appreciate this.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “I am.”

  “Really?’

  Havstein commanded us into our outdoor clothes and out of the Factory. He dragged us out to the car and arranged us like cheap ornaments in the seats. I rolled the window down and stuck my head out as he got the car moving and drove up the hill and out of Gjógv.

  “Where … where are we going?” asked Anna, unable to stop giggling. “It’s two-thirty in the morning,” mumbled Palli, looking peeved. Carl was dozing in the front, his head lolling from side to side as we swung down toward Funningur.

  “Wait, and you’ll all see.”

  “I want to go home,” Palli moaned. “Can’t you just drive me home first? I’m not really up to excur … escurs … to trips right now.”

  “Fresh air’s good for you, Palli. Non-prescription. Completely free of side effects.”

  Palli sniffed and grumbled to himself, stared out the window and Havstein looked at his watch.

  “Damn,” he said, “this’ll be a near thing.”

  “What?” I ventured.

  “Wait and see.”

  Havstein slammed down the accelerator and we bombed down the empty road toward Streymoy, then after crossing the bridge he wove in and out of the narrow backstreets, taking unfamiliar short cuts, I clung to the headrest in front of me, thinking how if we had an accident now there’d not be a single tooth left between us. But Havstein didn’t crash. We sped through the landscape southward and drove up endless hills. I saw Skælingsfjall rising far ahead, and then I realized what he had planned for us.

  “Are we going up there? Now?” Havstein drove into Skælingur and searched for a suitable place to park. “Yes, we’re going up there. A great idea, don’t you think?”

  We did our best to keep up with Havstein as he walked briskly up the mountain slopes, a steep walk, tough going, but we did it, and for every inch we clambered up the view got better, the rain had stopped and the clouds from earlier were being blown away by the wind, it wasn’t as cold as I’d feared either, one of the final nights of warmth, Indian summer on the Faroes, and I grabbed Carl who was lagging behind, dragged him after me by the arm and Anna hauled Palli along, the landscape opened up and below us all the islands came into view so we could see almost the whole country, and the sun had just started to rise, so we gathered our remaining strength, dragged ourselves up the path, shedding clothes as we went because it was so warm, tying jackets around our waists and taking turns to push each other on, Havstein shouted that it wasn’t much farther and even Palli did his best now, had understood our aim, and this is among the things I remember best, the night we conquered Skælingsfjall in half the time it should have taken, that night we were spiders along the gentle slopes of the mountain and we reached the top almost at the moment the sun rose cautiously over the horizon far out into the Atlantic and spread across the landscape, washed over Tórshavn far below and the villages around it, and then eventually the mountainsides too, the whole country, and up toward us, we sat huddled together with a rock behind our backs and in the end sun in our faces, blinding us, and I remember how we laughed, how we screamed, up there on the mountain top, and I remember we screamed because it was so beautiful, because we’d managed to struggle all the way up here to see this, and this was the country we lived in, and it was a beautiful country, a place where people had been born, had died, but most of all we screamed because we knew that it would soon be over, in less than seven months we’d go our separate ways forever, and of course we could get together again, but it would never be the same, we’d never go back home together again, never wake up under the same roof in a closed down factory in Gjógv, where hardly anybody lived any longer, and those screams are what I remember, cries of joy and despair into emptiness, a despair about money controlled by idiotic politicians in ministerial positions given out like candy drops in a country in perpetual debt and companies that are closed down and people that are left to their fate without jobs without money without plans or prospects pushed aside forgotten hidden away sent packing on the wind and those who can’t manage now must wait for better times and it isn’t true there’s always another bus, or train, or boat, that’s just what people say to comfort those who miss the departure and have to go back to the start where nobody lives anymore and we were quiet after that and the sun lay gently on our faces making them soft and I don’t know why, maybe it had to do with the sun rising over the mountain, or maybe it had to do with everything and nothing, but it was on that morning, up there on the mountain that I suddenly came upon the idea of what we should do, and I leaned toward Havstein and said: “Let’s go to the Caribbean.”

  “We’ll just move,” I said. “Go away. We’ll build a boat. A sailboat. And we’ll leave.”

  He just laughed to begin with. Then he saw I meant it seriously and his smile vanished.

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “It’s as easy as we make it.”

  “Can’t we at least fly?”

  “No.”

  It had to be a boat. And we had to build it. I don’t know exactly why I insisted on that, but it felt important. Perhaps because I wanted us to do it ourselves. Prove we could create something with our own hands. One last push.

  “But what will we do there, Mattias?”

  “Same as we do here. Work.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Anything.”

  The others joined in the conversation and I did my best to convince them that this wasn’t just a good option, it was the only one we had. There was skepticism at first, but I painted them marvelous pictures, laid plans the size of football pitches and colored the continents and oceans between them with optimism’s gigantic colored crayons.

  “And it’s not exactly like going to an unknown country. Havstein knows the Caribbean inside out. And we’ve all read the guide. A few times over. We know where we’re going. It’s just to cross the sea, and come ashore. There’s no reason to stay.”

  Everybody nodded quietly around the semi-circle.

  “Palli? You’ve always talked about building a boat, haven’t you?”

  “Not always. I—”

  “And Havstein,” I continued, “Havstein has waited for this for twenty years.”

  And we all knew, although nobody said it, that this wouldn’t be just a move, but an evacuation. We’d need a good wind behind us.

  And we’d need money.

  That morning, as the rain started pouring again and we came down from the mountain and drove home to our beds, I felt lighter than ever before, I was sure we could do it, it seemed right, things seemed to make sense, and for once I’d solved a problem instead of letting myself be pushed over by it. We had a plan, a crazy plan, possibly, but a plan. It was time to put an end to the low level activity that had reigned in the Factory since Sofia’s death, time to fill the empty space with work. We had things to do. Lots.

  We all padded into the Factory and up to our bedrooms, but I didn’t go to bed right away. I unpacked my wet luggage, put the driest garments in the wardrobe and hung the rest over the chairs and table. That was when I remembered them. My books! My box of space books was still standing outside, in the rain, I’d forgotten to bring it in when the others arrived. My heart thudded in my chest, I ran down the stairs, ran out, but as I lifted the damp box it fell apart, the sodden books fell out landing in the puddles outside the Factory. I went down on my knees and began picking them up feverishly, trying to dry them on my shirt sleeves, but the pages were stuck together and several books had come unglued already, they crumbled in my hands, ruined, wads of paper loosened from old, tatty covers and floated out over the ground beside me, nothing to save. I sat on my haunches, staring at what was l
eft of the books I’d collected since I was ten, the official book about the moon landing from 1969, Buzz Aldrin’s biography, books about the moon, about Mars, about outer space and the farthest flung corners where nobody would want to set foot, and an atlas of the stars, the cosmos, books on Jupiter and the Andromeda Galaxy, and comets and satellites and meteorites that might come crashing through the atmosphere to end the whole party at any moment. There was nothing I could do. Neither about the meteors nor the water. Carefully I gathered the remains of the books, the loose pages, the ruined box, and threw it all in the trash can outside the front door and went back in, padded quietly up to my room, lay under the heavy duvet, dreamed of nothing.

  4

  And then autumn came. The last on the Faroes. It was that autumn everybody got sicker, maybe it was something in the air, smog, I don’t know, at any rate it wasn’t fresh enough. And slowly but surely we started to lapse back into old habits, and into old files, into fresh delusions, Havstein restarted a program of modest medication for Anna and Palli, anti-psychotics as a food supplement. It was a good thing we were leaving.

  We began building the boat too, and as the leaves fell from the nonexistent trees, Carl told us how it was he’d set to sea in a yellow life-boat and almost got shipwrecked in Gjógv three weeks later. It was that autumn we saved every krone and lived on the cheap, when Palli’s grandma died and Carl and I moved into her house in Tórsgøta, Tórshavn, when we filled in complicated travel claims for imaginary trips between Gjógv and Tórshavn, and we scanned with detectors for loopholes in the law, the rules and regulations and we wound the authorities that were closing us down around our little fingers, there was money to be had, and we extracted what we needed, not that any of us really understood how, it was that autumn we worked so hard we almost forgot we were sick, we were ants, entrepreneurs of the mental trade on never-ending shifts, no time to lose, no scope for changing our minds, to turn back and reconsider. The snowball I’d cautiously rolled down the mountain that morning several weeks ago had grown to gigantic proportions, as it rumbled on with enormous force, lives would be lost in trying to stop it now.

  It was the boat or nothing.

  Didn’t we just see the world at an angle? Wasn’t that what Havstein had said when I once asked him what was wrong with us? For people with a different view on reality there are liberties others never have. The privileges of the insane, because they know not what they do. We’d talked about it once. That we couldn’t be blamed for our actions, our ideas, in the same way as others. That we were God’s curious creatures. On a good day that’s what I felt. And on the days we came up with the most idiotic proposals and plans, nobody could hold us responsible for it. Because, when you’re told often enough that you have no grip on reality, that you mix your private fantasy world with the accepted world view, then you’re forced to give all your ideas equal consideration. That’s how it was possible to propose crossing the ocean in a homemade boat. I couldn’t be held responsible for that. I was guilt free. You can’t pass me off as insane. Or an idiot. You owe it to listen to me. Even you have trouble knowing whether it’s me or my illness speaking. You take what you get. That’s what we’ve done for years already. I reckon that’s why no one automatically wrote the boat idea off as ridiculous from the outset. True, we went on deliberating for a couple of days, Havstein added and amended, guiding us discreetly away from our most extreme suggestions, like copying Thor Heyerdahl and sailing in a reed boat or building a submarine and traveling undetected, like Captain Nemo, surfacing at the coast of some island. We laid plans, sketched, and tapped our calculators red hot until we all agreed it was achievable within the deadline. And one day Havstein gathered us all solemnly round the kitchen table and said: okay, hoist the topsail!

  From that day our speed increased with every orbit, we spun around our own axes and worked twice as hard as before, dug deeper and deeper into our pockets and put all we had on the table and I remember how Carl came in smiling one day, he’d been down to town and spoken to the bank, and as we sat there in the kitchen with the figures before us he put a piece of paper in front of me.

  “For the boat,” he said. “I’ve got some savings we could use. If you want.”

  I looked at the sheet. I could not believe what I saw.

  Carl had exactly $142,000 to spare. It was just under half of what we needed.

  Silence fell around the table.

  “What is this?” I asked. “This is nearly a million kroner!”

  “Where did you get that from?” Anna cut in, and pierced Carl with her eyes.

  “I was a photographer. A few years back,” he answered, and shrugged his shoulders.

  Nobody said a word more. Carl passed the paper to Havstein. He took it, looked at it, put it down with a heavy sigh.

  “That’s a lot of money, Carl. It really is a lot of money.”

  “I know. I invested a bit too little in the last boat I used,” he answered, adding a smile that fell short of the real thing. “I’d prefer to travel better this time.”

  “Are you sure about this, Carl?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Absolutely.”

  “Okay.”

  First there was just the silence. The internalized jubilation that spread vaguely through the body and settled itself carefully somewhere inside. Then the smiles came creeping, tears erupted. We smiled. Smiled as we never had before. We shouted and howled on top of each others’ voices and we hung around Carl’s neck, Santa Claus in mid-October. The boat was going to happen. You could be damned sure of it. We were ready for evacuation.

  This is how we did it:

  Carl’s money got us the hull, and with help from a DIY boatmaker in Tórshavn we rented a mold and cast a forty-foot sailing boat, we worked in an enormous warehouse with the instruction manual in one hand, tools in the other, hefty disagreements flared up about how and what to do, yet we always agreed in the end, worked as one when push came to shove, decided on the sandwich method and greased the mold with release agent, greased and polished, applied thick gel coat, followed by layer upon layer of polyester and sealant and fiberglass, of fiberglass and sealant and polyester, and rolled and smoothed, and then repeated it all, ad infinitum, finished it all with insulating Divinycell and yet more layers of fiberglass and polyester and sealant, and then more fiberglass in the bottom of the boat for added strength, until fiberglass was all we could think about during the day, and we dreamed of polyester at night, and we turned the mold over, repeated every step, working quicker this time, we knew now that when the fiberglass was saturated its color shifted from white to transparent, we knew every air bubble had to be rolled out, knew that it had to be sixty-four degrees Fahrenheit in the room for things to set, we learned from our mistakes and sheer repetition as our money ran out and we had to get more careful, work more quickly, cut back on mistakes, topcoat, gel coat, freeboard, port and starboard, we didn’t have the money to do the work twice, we reinforced the bottom, laid lead down by the keel, made calculations for the center of gravity without quite getting it right, paid some local sailors to have a look, but too late, they stood on the concrete floor of the warehouse and laughed, told us we’d be sailing with a slight list all the way, it would be a lopsided boat, but a boat all the same, we argued, and moved on to the deck, molded it, worrying whether things should be this way or that, fixed and riveted it to the hull, and watched our money vanish from our bank accounts and our doubt grow bigger by the day, with a faint unease that the boat would never float properly, that it might keel over and capsize in the waves, just like Alexander L. Kielland twenty years prior, but all we could do was hope for the best, decide that it was good enough, that it had to work.

  Carl and I became weekly commuters, we spent our weekends with the others in a soundless Gjógv and the rest of the week down in Tórshavn. I got back the job I’d had before summer and continued with the hopeless task of creating forests on the Faroes along with the ever-optimistic Herluf and Jógvan, and Carl got a job at the
docks, loading and unloading the ships that came in. He soon got us a good deal on freight, and it wasn’t long before everything we needed for the boat was transported from the mainland to the Faroes for a symbolic sum. I’d usually go home through town after work, walk down Eystari Ringvegur in the twilight, past the stadium with its training sessions and the whooshing sounds of the bowling alley opposite, down through Vi∂arlundin Park with its beautiful trees and art gallery and then up toward the SMS Shopping Center where I’d buy the bare essentials at Miklagar∂ur, then I’d walk with my shopping bags into the town center, and I remember thinking there were more trees in town these days, seemed that way at least, I noticed gardens here and there with big trees, bushes on street corners, and I thought perhaps it was possible after all, if only they could spread, like a reverse desertification, these clusters of trees that everybody was so proud of that they marked them on the town map, if one could only get them to spread across the islands, if one only kept planting more, it might just work. But I was also aware that these trees only stayed alive because the houses sheltered them from all sides, protected them from the saltwater carried on the wind each day in foul weather, and that in the long run you couldn’t win. You could plant trees on every slope from island to island, but for each tree you planted the previous one would shrivel up and die, and when you’d finally finished, when you’d planted the last tree and looked back, there’d be just a handful of trees left standing, scattered thinly across the country. But there was no giving up. I went on with my work, planted seeds between the big trunks, and walked in circles to make the experience last, while my council wages dripped into Havstein’s account, krone by krone.