At some point, after a few weeks, months, he meets up with the girl again, he can’t be bothered any more, he hasn’t for a long time, he just hasn’t made the effort to go home (what’s he meant to do there?). What he’s been up to? Nothing, he’s just drifted around a bit, in San Francisco, then later he hitches down the Pacific coast, is he in Los Angeles? Maybe, maybe not, does it really matter if he’s in Los Angeles, loads of other people must be or have been there, lots of wide streets, people in their cars, Sunset Boulevard, but no loci, at least there were those in San Francisco, one day he was out at Malibu Beach, walked a little way up into the dry hills, pissed on a faded-green bush—or was it an agave?—turned around and looked out across the ocean, it looked like an ocean. At some point he meets up with the girl again, quite by chance actually, somewhere between Santa Barbara and Santa Monica, maybe, she’s run out of money, or maybe it’s time for her to go home, and so he goes with her.
They’re back on the island, in “the endless summer,” the girl euphoric, for weeks, months, with shiny dancing eyes and nonstop prattling, laughing, waving around her both chubby and long, both gracious and bungling fingers, always in motion, like tentacles on an insect, she is overflowing with stories, longs to be back, has crazy plans for her future in America, Mexico, South America, she’s in love, as usual when traveling she’s met the one, the love of her life, maybe she’ll go back to him, live with the Mexican or Venezuelan or Colombian guy she presumably met on the beach, in Santa Barbara or Santa Monica, or maybe she’s been all the way down to Baja California, Yucatán? one of those suntanned idlers always drifting around like one of the more or less “locals” on every beach around the world where the sand burns under your feet, she was made for him and that life and that climate, not Denmark, not the endless cold, slushy winters, the grumpy people, she’s a life-loving person, she wants to live, dance, enjoy life, she almost can’t wait, she’s just popped home to say hi, earn some money waiting tables or tending bar, as soon as she’s got enough money she’ll be off again, out! He, on the other hand, handsome Lars, has nothing to tell, he can’t be bothered, what is he meant to say? America, well it’s just . . . America. But he looks a dream, they all say that, “Lars, you look like the American dream!” Long-Beach-tanned, with sun-bleached hair, those twinkling blue eyes, hasn’t he been discovered? Wasn’t he going to Hollywood? Well, sure, that was the plan, but he didn’t really quite get there, or maybe he did, he went to the Strasberg Institute, in New York, but that was just a school. Right, well, they say, you have to start somewhere, it’s hard work, what had you imagined? Nothing, that things would just happen; isn’t that what happens in America, it’s there things happen, isn’t it? He smiles, resigned, charming, he knows what he’s like, but he can’t be bothered (“know yourself,” for pity’s sake!). He resigns himself to what there was, does as he did before he left for what really was and turned out to be the journey of his life (whereas for her it was just one of the numerous trips with which she postponed her life, and which thus ultimately became her destiny, her modus vivendum, the eternal deferment); nothing, that’s what he does, unlike the girl he doesn’t seem to have had any kind of significant or unforgettable experience, “the journey of my life,” nothing happened.
Some weeks have passed, months, half a year, a whole year? Suddenly one evening the phone rings at the home of a young single woman and her daughter on the outskirts of an even smaller provincial town, almost just a one-horse backwater, in the southern periphery of the country, where it is at its extreme and utmost state of impoverishment, and where junkies, battered mopeds with green milk-crates on the luggage carrier, and human peculiarities are in the majority, and where the slender, sensitive young boy now lives in a rented basement room, which isn’t really a room but just the inmost of a series of small damp cement rooms of the kind found under most of the run-down buildings from the mid-twentieth-century on the outskirts of market towns or one-horse backwaters, the kind of room that the owner has either never been down to visit or in the very first week filled to the low ceiling with odds and ends and half-emptied packing-cases brought along from earlier or even earlier lives, and a couple of shelves on the wall furthest away from the door perhaps hold some jars of now thoroughly slimy-brown preserved fruit, cucumber or pumpkin left by the previous or previous-but-one owner, jars that can only just be made out in the grimy-ish light seeping in through the little window, virtually just a peephole, north-facing and with a greasy, cracked, and sometimes simply smashed windowpane, stuck together by two-, ten-, twenty-year-old remains of cobweb, and in which the slender young boy has, for four hundred kroner per month, been permitted to stay temporarily with his growing despair, and down to which, with help from the carpenter’s assistant who is currently the boyfriend of the single mother upstairs, he has dragged an old wood-burning stove that he has “borrowed” from one of the many sheds or charming little half-timbered buildings dotted along the forest tracks and under the administration of the manor house, the location of which is a mystery to him, and installed (the stove) by simply taking a claw hammer and knocking a hole in the chimney and shoving the stovepipe in and then closing the hole with mineral wool insulation and mortar, and to which he now returns “home” every evening at dusk from the experimental drama school, by means of which he is currently attempting to come into existence, lights the wood-burner with twigs he has found on his walk through the forest, and maybe a log “borrowed” from one of the nearest neighbors’ carports, and then sits for an hour or two in the soporific rumbling of the flames in the stove and yet again fails in the writing of a poem, gives up, snuffs out the candle and lies down on the mattress on the floor and pulls the smoke-greasy duvet over the suede jacket and the cap he keeps on around the clock all through the winter. The single mother opens the hatch placed under the back staircase that leads up to the second floor, takes a few steps down the ladder and calls out to him. He gets up from the little table in front of the stove, unravels the duvet he had wrapped around himself like a thick floor-length skirt before sitting down, and opens the door and says, yes? Phone for you, she says. For me? he says. Yes. And so he ascends the stairs, steps out of his winter boots and walks into the room in his thick woolen socks and picks up the receiver from the table where the telephone is sitting. Hello? he says. He can hear it straight away in the voice. The slightly strident, aristocratic female voice that has always sounded as if it was singing the final terribly beautiful song of a dying aristocracy, but now finally cracks. Have you heard?! she says. What? he says. He hasn’t heard anything, he knows nothing about the world beyond his own despair and basement room with the stove and its red-hot chinks, several months have passed since he spoke with anyone other than the single mother upstairs, her daughter, and the carpenter, who is gradually moving in, he hasn’t even been in touch with them, the others from the journey through “the endless summer.” Lars . . ., she says stridently, raspingly. What? he says. He is . . . he has been . . . diagnosed with . . . (and then she says the unmentionable, the three capital letters that sooner or later will turn into four, and which along with the threat of nuclear war and its subsequent “nuclear winter” is their epoch’s Hell writ large on earth). And here, at this very moment, in those three letters of the alphabet, or at least in the silence that follows them, “the endless summer” is finally over. Were there a Grace, a God, or just an Olympian narrator, then the tale would end here. But the worst thing about death is not that it is the master of time and the world of humankind and their stories. The worst thing is that it’s vain, a pampered hussy who gets everything she points at, but is still never satisfied, she doesn’t just want more, she wants to flaunt herself, show how wonderfully unpredictable she is, how impulsive, capricious, so eminently alive: sometimes she stretches, death, indolently, tenderly, ah! We’ve already spotted her, suddenly there she is, the time has come, but she drags it out a bit, upsidaisy! a moment more, a few hours, weeks, months, years, ah! she can’t quite decide, now or . .
. now? no, wait! maybe . . . You just never know with death, but once you’ve caught sight of her and realized that she’s what it’s all about, then you can’t take your eyes off her, it’s impossible to turn away or really concentrate on anything else, you’re mesmerized, suffering euphorically, like being so intensely in love, seduced by the Other, until the moment she finally, suddenly, whoops! gets down to it or just, oopsie! out it slips, that little liberating “curtains.”
They say he will have to fight, he will have to hold out, there are lots of people who live for many years with that disease, which isn’t actually a real disease, he isn’t sick at all, is he, what he’s carrying around inside is really just the possibility of a disease, it hasn’t developed, maybe it never will, or not for a few years, maybe many, as long as he has the motivation. But he doesn’t, motivation for what? Just to live, survive? Do it themselves, they can, if it’s meant to be so fantastic, seven billion people, all just surviving, fighting, holding out, for pity’s sake, that’s just too ridiculous. Handsome Lars resigns himself, smiles, he can see himself, after all, he smiles for a moment (his damned charming, indolent, and infernally provocative smile). Then the smile sinks, he looks sad now, not sick, just sad, can’t be bothered to smile. After a few months the disease develops, first he just has a cold, maybe it lasts a bit longer (well it’s winter, after all), then the cold turns into pneumonia, but it’s not pneumonia, the doctor says, it’s it. He is momentarily flooded with a cold light. Then he closes his eyes and lets himself ebb. It is perfectly simple. He wants to go home.
On a quite ordinary gray, blustery autumn or spring day, the slender boy pays a visit to the small detached house on the outskirts of the provincial town where the other one grew up once upon a time. It’s afternoon, the handsome one, whose movements are now not indolent, but slack, is home alone. The little sister has moved, several years ago, the father is undoubtedly at work, at least he’s not to be seen, perhaps he’s just too hard to spot in the dimness of the house, built at the time of the oil crisis, with its much too small windows, some closed, with leaded densely-colored fluted panes through which the light can but sluggishly filter. The most present Third Party is the mother, who died a few years earlier from cancer, of course, the typical suburban death, after a long painful sickness, and who for her entire life (or at least the entire childhood that the once so handsome boy can remember) seen from the outside had been a quiet, gray existence, but seen from inside, in the dark daily round of the detached house, was always a slightly dissatisfied, hankering and, like the father, deeply Christian, that is to say bitter, person. The kitchen, murky, a bag of sliced sourdough rye bread on the brown plastic worktop next to the sink, a packet of sliced and stridently pink salami (the only color in the murky-brown haze), a small aluminum foil tray of liver pâté, lightly squeezed in the middle by the last person to have dug out a knob with his butter knife, probably the father, who has made his packed lunch in the morning and taken it with him to the office, and left the aluminum foil tray, the packet of bright pink salami slices with the white eczema-like spots, “31 slices,” and the bag of bread out for his son, who can’t be bothered, neither making a sandwich nor eating, he just can’t be bothered, he’s free, finally free from having to have an appetite for anything whatsoever. He sits at the kitchen table with his hands thrust in under the shrinking thighs, his bare feet dangling, he looks at the other, the slender one, with a resigned, now gently ironic smile. What they talk about we will never know, it’s the silence we listen to, the ticking of the wall clock in the sitting room, the refrigerator that stops with a click and a sloshing sound, a car rolls past outside in the cul-de-sac. The handsome one sighs, he hears it, the smile rises for a moment, resigned, ironic, and not directed at anyone, and dwindles and is gone before the slender one has time to look up and take it in.
There is nothing more to be said, the slender young boy returns to his basement, which he leaves some weeks later in favor of a small three-room sublet in the capital, where he lives without contact to the surrounding world, no telephone, apart from the entry phone, which no one ever uses except, on a Wednesday or Saturday, foreigners delivering advertising brochures door to door, and where he sits all day long and long after darkness has fallen at a small table by the window with a view of the night sky and the ascending airplanes flashing red and white. “The endless summer,” the girl, who sooner or later was bound to get pregnant, her vacant gaze when she comes home from the clinic, the photograph he had taken of her on their trip south, through Paris and all the way down to Portugal’s Algarve coast, naked at the top of the dune, huge, heavy, the belly, the shapeless breasts that seem to flow down across the sand, the sound when they return to the provincial town after a month away and step into the room they have rented: the clicking rain of thousands, tens of thousands of invisible, panic-stricken, starved fleas dancing up and down on the parquet floor; her best friend, who is soft, dark, and maternal, and whose boyfriends and later her fiancé—always immensely energetic and creative young or slightly older men—always leave her, but never for another woman, always for the first man in their life; the slender, oh so sensitive young boy, who himself gradually becomes aware of men looking at him, and the potential advantages, first on Rue des Archives in Paris and in the bars and clubs of the surrounding neighborhood, later in New York, at the Zone with its two stages, where anyone with an inclination or sufficient disinclination can step up, disrobe, and self-flagellate, video projections on the raw walls showing Californian bodybuilders, all Aryan-blue-eyed and with bleached hair, posing, and at the back, somewhat randomly like the remains of board partitioning around a construction site, a public pissoir or maybe the back of a bus shelter, the very zone, painted black with an entrance at both ends and nothing inside except a dim passage, which is either empty or, without warning, like after a silent nuclear-war alarm, packed to bursting point with male bodies, copulating deliriously, the explosion of humid heat, the sweet scent of secretions (sperm, saliva, sweat, and blood), the doors these looking eyes could open: to apartments in Greenwich Village, dinners at expensive restaurants in Soho, theater tickets and weekend trips “upstate.” The tale isn’t “larger than life,” it’s the only salvation of the times.
One early morning the entry phone buzzes and the slender boy rises from the mattress on the floor and walks drowsily across and without opening his eyes picks up the receiver and says he doesn’t want any, slams down the receiver and goes back to the mattress and lies down, and the entry phone immediately buzzes again, and he gets up, now wide awake, aggressive, walks across, and picks up the receiver and says that he damn well doesn’t want any advertising brochures, and a thin, somewhat alarmed voice says that it’s not delivering advertising brochures but a private telegram.
When he enters the hospital room, several of the others are already there, not all of them, not the entire “endless summer” gathered one last time, not yet, we’ll postpone that until the finale, when the organ strikes up, but the girl and a female friend—who has not hitherto played any role, but who now, at the last moment, considers herself entitled to enter the story and, by virtue of the fact that she has very recently embarked on her studies to be a doctor, stage-manage the entire drama around the deathbed, convene the relatives, whisper in their ears with the correct medical terms for what no one wants to know about because anyone can see that it is no longer of any use or significance to know something that without a sound, without a word, you can, whether you want to or not, simply see, and hold them back if they instinctively reach out to touch—the handsome one’s little sister, the lanky artist, who has not yet met his God, and the mother, but without her two boys and without her husband, the Portuguese youth, we’ll leave them out for now. First, the room: white, bare as a village church; and in the room: the living gathered around the incomprehensible, what is no longer narrative, but image, icon:
He lies or hovers as if weightless in a web of transparent tubes and wires attached to his skin with
pins, plasters, cuffs, and, at the other end, flashing monitors and bags containing fluid and blood suspended from shiny metal stands, the handsome body with its beautiful hands transformed into a score of bones set out in a rickety pattern on a white cloth (no longer body, but a vacuum covered with transparent sallow-gray skin stretched out by the bones as if by the poles in a tent canvas), hands swollen blue-gray and at the very end of the ankle bone shafts hang two colossal black-blue club feet, the head isn’t a head, but a cranium covered with vellum, the hollow uncannily alive eyes and the youth’s tender stubble. He doesn’t look like, he is the one he is, it is prosaic and suddenly obvious: Jesus on the cross is not God’s son, but Everyman, the suffering human being nailed to his or her consciousness. He looks at them, from time to time the pains strike, like a veil pulled down over his eyes, then he looks at them again, and again this hint of a smile that is neither scornful nor mocking, but just resigned, the gifted individual who has allowed life, all the possibilities, slip out of his hands and knows it and regrets nothing, that’s how it is, ecce homo, here I am, my own creation. They don’t say anything, there’s nothing left to say, the monitors are buzzing, the traffic keeps moving on the other side of the window panes, la circulation, not headed anywhere, just round and round in this one and only world, not a word, no sudden despair or a final biblical cry, “father, why hast thou forsaken me?!” No, he hasn’t been forsaken by anyone, he is his own creation, étant donné, the last bit of a human being hanging in a bare white room.
The Endless Summer Page 10
