by BRIAN HALL
“Look.” He sounds impatient. “The test is right in front of you. There it is.” He gestures again across the ice. “No logistics necessary, you could do it right now. The cold will relax you and your clothes will weigh you down. I won’t stop you.”
She looks across the ice.
“Having said that,” he goes on, “I’d suggest you wait until morning. The majority of suicides happen in the evening or during the night, because people unconsciously associate the end of day with the end of life, loss of light with loss of hope, and so on. It’s the same mistake that makes old people think the world around them—culture, values, common decency—is dying. It’s because they are dying. What’s it called in English? The pathetic fallacy, I think. It doesn’t help that poetry and novels and television and every other form of human narrative traffic in exactly this confusion. The radio says that tomorrow will be a beautiful day. First thing in the morning, with the sun rising into a blue sky, go down to the beach. If you keep going then, maybe you mean it.”
“Radio?”
“Hard to believe, I know, but I don’t have internet.”
“Not hard to believe at all. I was surprised you have a radio.”
He smiles. “You’re a witty one.”
They walk in silence for a minute. It’s getting to be that time in a cloudy evening when most of the light seems to be generated by the snow and the ice. Thomas veers off toward a stretch of sandy ground to pluck a stem of tall grass. He returns to her, displaying it. “Ammophila arenaria. Lila, it’s not for you. The genus name means ‘sand-lover.’ In Danish we call it marram. There’s not much of it on this island because it grows in sand dunes and the beaches here are mostly stony. Its beard looks like wheat, though of course the seeds are smaller. Look, can you see how the stalk curls around itself, almost forming a tube? That helps it retain moisture in windy conditions.”
It is true that all facts are interesting in themselves, but this one is only mildly so to Mette. Why is he telling her this?
“In North Jutland this grass helped anchor the sand dunes, which are extensive there. Farmers used to cut it for fodder and thatch, and with the loss of the root systems, the dunes started migrating. They buried whole villages, leaving only the marram-grass thatched roofs visible. Ecological disaster in the comic mode.”
This is more interesting, but still. They walk on. She can see the mill in the dusk not far ahead.
“I’ve been learning to identify every species of vegetation, insect, rodent, and bird on the island. I’ve lived here for eight years, and I figure the island is just small enough that I could accomplish it all before I die. The grasses are the hardest. Second are the beetles. This is like what Candide, after all his travels, called cultivating his garden.”
“Or what Dorothy meant after Oz, when she said, ‘There’s no place like home.’”
She is trying to poke fun at him, but he says, “Exactly.”
They leave the beach and walk around to the mill door. He pauses at the bottom of the stairs. Lila sticks her nose between his legs and he pats her flank vigorously. “It’s deeply satisfying, conquering a subject. I think you, more than most people, understand what I’m talking about.”
“You’re telling me to find myself a project so that I won’t drown myself.”
“I’m not telling you anything. Drown yourself tomorrow morning if you want to. The question is, do you want to?”
“Look, it’s great that naming the grasses and beetles makes you happy. I like knowing things, too. But no matter how much I learn, when I die it will all be snuffed out along with my brain, so what’s the point?”
He says something in Danish.
“That’s very helpful.”
“It’s from a novel that every schoolchild in Denmark used to read, about a schoolteacher living on a small island. In English, it’s something like, ‘This island is so small—a molehill in a field of blue. Dear God, what is that, set against the questions of the big world? Nothing! But how big are the big world’s questions, seen from Orion’s Belt?’”
Mette is not sure that he’s trying to help her so much as showing off, playing the guru. “Sure. Which is an equally good argument for you to drown yourself tomorrow morning, too.” For once she doesn’t wait for him to take the lead, she wants to deny him the pleasure, so she goes up the stairs and through the door. He follows without a word. It’s getting dark, so he switches on a shaded lamp attached to one of the bookshelves, above a reading chair. “I expected kerosene,” Mette says.
“Or maybe whale oil? Both would be environmentally idiotic, considering I make my own electricity.”
“I was trying to be witty again.”
“Repetition is the soul of stupidity.” He takes a can off one of the shelves, opens it with a Swiss Army knife, spoons glistening chunks into a bowl, and sets it down for the dog. “I want to pick up some coffee at a depot next to the ferry landing. Sanne closes at eight-thirty, so I’m going to head over there. I’ll be back in an hour or so. If you need to piss or shit, there’s a composting toilet ten meters away near the garden, you can see it from the window. The hut is insulated, paper’s in there, another astonishing electric light, and even an electric heater if your ass gets too cold.”
The dog is already done eating. “Lila, come.” He disappears out the door, the dog crowding his heels. By the time she looks from the top of the steps a couple of seconds later, they’re both out of sight. Escape artist. And your little dog, too!
She’s momentarily at a loss for what to do. Then she realizes that she does need to piss so she goes out to the toilet. She flips a switch to the right of the door and an overhead bulb comes on. The small room, as by now she would expect, is well made and immaculate. It smells of fresh dirt and peat. She pisses and returns to the mill.
She spends some time idly looking at his books, most of which are in Danish or German. He has the complete works of Kierkegaard, whom Mette has vaguely heard of, but otherwise knows nothing about. She examines the way he anchored the shelves. She also looks at the collars he built to enclose the mill shaft where it comes out of the ceiling and goes into the floor. He fashioned single blocks of wood with beveled square cutouts and circular flanged rims that rotate smoothly within rings attached to the floor and ceiling. He is quite an impressive woodworker.
She climbs the ship’s ladder to the second floor, which she rightly guessed was his bedroom. A smaller room, of course, owing to the sloping walls. There are four square windows identical to the ones below, which let in so much dusk-light she doesn’t need to switch on the lamp. The dusk here really does last forever. His bed is single, placed lengthwise along the south wall, but somewhat separated from it because the bed is too long and has to accommodate a few inches of the adjacent walls. On the bed’s far side is a set of built-in shelves holding books, an old-fashioned clock, a water glass, a small atlas. The bed’s nearer side is only about two feet away from the mill shaft in the center of the room. She wonders if at night when he’s sleepy he ever stumbles into the shaft and gets thrown to the floor by its rotation. The image amuses her. She’s aware that her motive in coming up here is malicious, as she would hate the thought of anyone examining her own room. She looks out each of the four windows at the darkness of land and the glimmer of ice. What a view this man has during the day. She will admit, she admires the skill and energy he brings to creating exactly the world he wants to inhabit. His willpower. There’s something ever-so-slightly wizardly about it.
She returns to the bottom floor, fishes Newman out of her pack, sits back at the table. She’s almost done with volume three, and has just come across a figure Newman calls a parhexagon: a hexagon whose three pairs of opposite sides are equal and parallel but don’t necessarily equal each other. Newman proposes a theorem that you can take any irregular hexagon and if you draw diagonals to the adjacent sides and connect as vertices the centroids of the resulting triangles, th
e figure thus created will always be a parhexagon. Which is kind of interesting. She’d like to prove it to her own satisfaction, so she takes out her notebook and ruler and starts drawing. After a while she hears a hand on the doorlatch and the old man and his familiar come in.
“Hungry?” he asks.
“No.”
“It’s almost nine, all you had was a couple of biscuits when you first arrived.”
“Yet, strangely, I’m not hungry.”
“I’m making American-style home fries in your honor. Potatoes, onions, and garlic I grew myself. You can eat or abstain, as you wish.”
“Sounds good.”
“Lila, lie down.” She does exactly as he says, curling up on a rag rug under the ladder. He starts fetching, chopping, juggling, whistling, all-around bustling, while she continues to work on her diagram. The figure involves a lot of lines and she is just now realizing she should make it bigger. She sets the sheet aside, gets tape from her pack and connects four new sheets so that they form a 17” by 22” rectangle. Returns to work. A few minutes go by during which an ignorant observer who likes nothing better than to jump to conclusions might think, Here’s a happy family.
“Food’s ready,” the old man announces.
“Dig in,” she says, not looking up.
“Could you move that while we eat?”
As before, he doesn’t seem interested in what she’s doing. Which is fine with her. But it’s kind of strange that he never asks anything.
She sees that she needs to move the large sheet to make enough room, even if he eats alone, and besides, the thought of him getting grease on her diagram is intolerable, so she folds it and places it on top of her pack by the door. Lila gives her a look and the last half inch of her tail wriggles. When Mette returns to the table she sees that he’s put a plate down for her. “Just in case. You want a beer?”
“No thanks.”
“It’s home-brewed.”
“No thanks.”
“It’s your funeral.” He starts eating.
She realizes that, in part, she is just trying to bother him. This makes her feel petty and foolish. Worse, maybe he can tell. In fact, she is somewhat hungry and the home fries smell good. “I guess I’ll try some,” she says.
He swivels the handle of the serving spoon toward her. He also pours beer into her glass.
His home fries are excellent. The beer probably is as well, but she has this crazy feeling that if she drinks it, he will have captured her soul.
He eats and drinks while she nibbles, and that same ignorant observer would see a kindly old miller and his socially normal granddaughter sharing silent rapport of a winter evening.
“So you’ve never felt that you don’t belong anywhere?” Mette asks.
“Belonging is for ungulates.”
“And you’re a leopard.”
“I’m a man.”
“Humans are gregarious.”
“Human gregariousness is a holdover from chimpanzees, whose idea of socializing is to form tribes and kill outsiders. Predators like leopards are solitary by nature. The glory of humans is that they can choose to leave the herd.”
“This sounds Ayn Rand-ish.”
“Please. Have you read any Ayn Rand? She was a neurotic nitwit. She wanted to feel superior to other people, which is just gregariousness for megalomaniacs.”
In fact, she hasn’t read any Ayn Rand. Of course, maybe he hasn’t, either. “Yet you were a guru in a commune.”
“Which was a mistake. I wanted to inspire people, and I only made them weaker. Which made me feel like I deserved punishment, which made me stick a sword in my stomach, which was also a mistake, and now we’ve come full circle and proved to your satisfaction that I’m fallible.”
He clears the table and washes up. He’s so efficient, it doesn’t occur to her to offer help, and he seems neither to expect nor want it. She brings her parhexagon diagram back to the table and finishes constructing it. She starts labeling equal line segments, congruent and supplementary angles. Drying his hands on a dish towel, he stands over her. “The only meaning your life will ever have is the one you give it. So you’re all alone. Boo hoo! Everyone is alone. Most people don’t figure that out until they’re on their deathbeds, but you’ve been having fun making up your bed ahead of time, so if you don’t go swimming tomorrow morning maybe you’ll come out of this with a chance of leading a full and free life.” He hangs the dish towel on a rack on the side of the countertop cupboard. “It’s ten-thirty. I’m going to bed. If you get hungry, eat anything you see.” Lila lifts her head, half rises. He puts out a palm and she lies back down. He lifts the lid of the storage chest beneath the west window and pulls out a bedroll and a pillow. “Pad, clean sheets, blanket. Roll it out when you want.” He goes out to the toilet, returns, brushes his teeth at the sink. “Stay up as long as you want. One last piece of advice, though. A decision to kill yourself when you’re tired is no proper decision at all.”
“Pathetic fallacy, got it.”
He turns to Lila and she jumps into his arms. He starts up the ladder one-handed. “She used to be able to manage this on her own, but she’s getting old. Good night.” He disappears through the ceiling.
She spends a while staring at her diagram. Either it’s a harder problem than she thought, or she’s tired. As he suggested. Fuck, once again he put an idea in her head that squats and propagates. She works for another half an hour just to spite him, but really, she’s getting nowhere. She couldn’t get to sleep in the Copenhagen hotel last night until four, because she was still on Seattle time. Now it’s all crashing down on her, the three-day bus ride, the chain of flights, the bad night, the train, the ferry, the old man’s symposium. She doesn’t bother to brush her teeth. Unrolls the pad on the floor near the south window and turns out the light. Crawls between the sheets with her clothes on. Stares at the ceiling.
She listens to the creaking of the mill shaft, the sighing of the wind. Silence from the ice, silence from upstairs. From her position on the floor, all she can see out the window are the dark clouds, occulted every four seconds by the tip of a sail sweeping past. It reminds her of her old room in Astoria, where she had her nest below the window from which she could observe the sky and the birds and feel safe and invisible. She loved being alone then. She wonders if the parhexagon theorem is easy and she’s just being stupid. She wonders if her muddle-headedness is Alex’s fault, or her own besotted idiocy’s fault, or the long trip’s fault, or if she’s past her mental prime and it’s all downhill from here. I am in the frame of mind that I lost confidence in my future.
When she opens her eyes again, it’s still dark, but the first bit of dawnlight is creeping in. She checks her phone. 6:13 a.m. (613, 46—unhappy.) She rises, rolls up her bed, stores it away in the cupboard. Folds up her diagram and inserts it in her pack along with her Newman. No sound from upstairs. She steps onto the bottom slat of the ladder and listens. Nothing. (Creak of mill shaft.) She gingerly mounts two more slats and stretches to raise her eyes above the level of the upper floor. Nothing. The bed might be empty, but she can’t be sure from this angle. Maybe he’s in a hidden room, hanging upside down from a rafter.
She quietly descends, pulls on her boots, shrugs on her pack. Standing by the door, she scans the achingly beautiful space. She has left nothing behind. She steps out, latches the door, descends the stone steps. Circles around to the beach. There’s an orange glow in the east. The sky is enormous, tessellated across its entire expanse with gray and silver clouds, breaking up. It’s that time of dawn when the light makes everything shimmer, as though you can see individual water molecules jostling in the saturated air.
No fucking way is she going to remain within sight of those upper-floor windows. She walks west along the beach for half a mile, until the curve of the shore and some intervening bushes whose Linnaean names the old man surely knows put th
e mill out of sight. She steps across seaweed and driftwood onto the ice and walks straight out toward the open water.
Long ago in Astoria at bedtime when Mette wanted to read Wishner to her mother but her mother annoyingly wasn’t in the mood, she (her mother) would annoyingly say that it was her turn, and she would describe some interminable lucid dream she’d had when she was a girl. Mette mostly tuned her out, but there was a set of recurring dreams about an island far in the north that were vivid enough, maybe “magical,” that they stuck in Mette’s head. There was a castle on the island, and a mage, and snow and sleds and dogs. In one of the dreams her mother rode with the mage down to the edge of the island and continued out across the frozen sea. At the edge of the ice she climbed out of the sled and looked out over the water, where a pod of whales was passing. One of the whales nudged up against the ice and her mother hugged it. That’s the kind of romantic fluff her mother liked. It’s deflating to think that she resolutely left her life behind and crossed the United States and then the Atlantic Ocean and somehow ended up in one of her mother’s dreams.
She stands at the edge of the ice. If this piece under her cracked off, it would tilt and slide her in, like a burial at sea. If she couldn’t climb back up, her decision would be made for her. She’d get colder and sleepier and happier, then she’d turn on her back and look up at the morning sky and her backpack would pull her under, trapping her arms, holding her against the bottom. Wishner and Newman would help. Pumpkinseed excavated a simple burrow and failed to reappear from it in the spring.
But the ice doesn’t crack. And even though she’s some seventy yards from shore, the water looks to be only about five feet deep. Of course she could just continue out another hundred or two hundred yards, getting colder, sleepier, happier, etc. Call to the old man, “Come on in, the water’s fine!”
All her life she’s assumed her personality came entirely from her father. But she recognizes something of herself in the old man. She and he share what one might call mental rigor. Or maybe one might call it a cold cast of mind. It occurs to Mette for the first time to have some sympathy for her mother, who has none of that coldness. It must be tough to be sandwiched between a father and a daughter both of whom are unfathomable.
