The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

by Jo Nesbo

  I knew I should lie still. But I also knew there was half a ton of bull directly behind us, so I rolled sideways to the left. A shadow crossed over me, something big, like a ship blotting out the sun. Then it had passed and looking up I saw the narrow black buttocks of the enormous creature.

  It stopped. And turned.

  Suddenly everything around me went quiet, so quiet that the solitary scream – maybe it was a girl up on the barricade who saw what was about to happen – chilled me to the bone.

  The bull looked at me. The eyes were dead, expressed nothing other than that it saw me. He snorted. Scraped his front hoof against the cobblestones and lowered his horns. I didn’t move. But that tactic was no longer the right one. I had been seen. Separated out from the crowd. That black train of muscle flexed and then exploded in my direction. I was as good as dead. I closed my eyes.

  Someone grabbed hold of my foot and started pulling, sweeping me round as my chin bounced and scraped against the stones. The back of my head hit something, for a moment everything went black, and then I opened my eyes again. I had hit the wall of a house. Peter was standing above me, still holding on to my foot. A few metres away from us the man with the shaven head and the newspaper was dancing round the bull, busily distracting it with the aid of another man, also carrying a rolled-up newspaper. Peter positioned himself between the bull and me. A cow passed, and the bull seemed to lose interest and chugged off after her. The rest of the group, five bulls and cows, passed us directly afterwards, but ignored us. In truth they seemed tired of the whole business and just wanted to get away and find somewhere quiet and peaceful.

  I sat up with my back against the wall of the house, and Peter squatted down beside me. I breathed. In, then out. And then again. In, then out. Let my pulse gradually slow down as I saw the street emptying as people made their way towards the stadium.

  ‘Was that the plan?’ I asked after a while.

  ‘Was what the plan?’

  ‘This. For me to fall in front of the bulls and you to rescue me. Was that the plan all along?’

  I could see that he was on the point of saying something like: ‘What are you talking about?’ or: ‘I don’t understand.’ But maybe he knew that I had understood.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t the plan.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Not to rescue you, no.’ He rested his head against the whitewashed wall of the house. I did the same thing, looking up into the cloudless sky between the rooftops.

  On the side streets up and down the route they had already started to dismantle the barricades.

  ‘So you went to San Sebastián?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I needed to find out what had happened there.’

  ‘And did you find out?’

  ‘I saw your body.’

  ‘That isn’t me. At least not completely.’

  ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘It’s hard to explain. It is me, but without my feeling of a self.’

  ‘Is that why you were able to kill him?’

  ‘Yes. But it wasn’t easy. It was painful.’

  ‘But not so painful that you couldn’t do it?’

  ‘The pain of not getting Miriam would have been worse. The way I look at it, it was a necessary suicide.’

  ‘You had to kill yourself in order to win her?’

  ‘Two Peters would have been very confusing, don’t you think?’

  ‘Got a cigarette?’

  He straightened out his legs so that he could reach into his pocket and took two cigarettes from the packet. Lit up for us both.

  ‘What was it the first Peter did wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘He failed to see that you and Miriam might have been made for each other.’ He drew on his cigarette. ‘Drop the might have been: you two are made for each other. Did you meet her in San Sebastián?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘You’re two cicadas. Of course you found each other.’

  ‘I found her.’

  ‘Yes, only the male cicada sings.’

  I looked at him again. He seemed older now than when we had stood waiting for the bulls. As though he’d aged ten years over a couple of minutes.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked, dragging on my cigarette. ‘Did you find out how to travel through time?’

  ‘It took me eleven years,’ he said. ‘Me and a small group of researchers in Switzerland. And you don’t travel through time, you travel between parallel universes or sequences of events. We discovered a way to slip in the back door of a parallel universe, but the problem was in finding which universe to enter, since there’s an infinity of them, and most of them are dead, cold worlds. You can’t change anything in a universe – the sequence of events is fixed – but you create new universes by moving something, even if it’s just an atom, from one universe to another. If you discover a universe that is, up to a particular point – for example, up to the morning after you rescued Miriam – identical to the one you inhabit, and you transport yourself there, a new universe is created in which you feel as though you’ve changed the sequence of events, but actually it’s simply a new one. Although actually it isn’t even really new, it’s just that you’re experiencing it for the first time. Understand?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I discovered a way of finding universes that resemble the one you inhabit. We call it a synchronised habitat. In the universe I come from I’ll be awarded the Nobel Prize for it.’

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

  ‘So you slipped into this universe directly after I rescued Miriam. But why not before?’

  ‘Because the perfect starting point is that I saved her life. That is, that she believes I’m the one who saved her life. So I needed you first.’ He took a breath. ‘As you know, I’m unable to swim.’

  I shook my head. ‘But good God, why didn’t you simply discover a universe where you get Miriam without doing anything?’

  ‘They exist too, of course, but they’re impossible to find, since a synchronised habitat contains only other universes that are similar. So I had to enter one of these and start to create, or to experience from within it a new one, which would hopefully be the one in which I end up getting Miriam.’

  ‘You really give a whole new dimension to the phrase “searching for love”,’ I said, and regretted at once my attempt to be funny. Peter didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Love is the greatest,’ was all he said, following the drifting cigarette smoke with his eyes. ‘There is an infinite number of universes in which you and I sit together and have this conversation, and in which the smoke curls away in exactly this particular way. And yet another infinity with exactly this same conversation but in which the smoke curls away in a slightly different direction, or in which one particular word is replaced with another. But there is no room for these universes in my synchronised habitat. So in all of those for which I have room, you are the one who gets Miriam. And to create a happy ending for myself I need to go via them.’

  ‘Because love is greatest?’

  ‘Greater than anything else.’

  ‘Love is only a sensation fostered by evolution to ensure that the human race will procreate and protect its genes and its closest family members in an efficient way.’

  ‘I know,’ said Peter, stubbing out his cigarette on the cobblestones. ‘And yet still it is greater than that.’

  ‘So great that you’re willing to kill this universe’s version of yourself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And me, your best friend?’

  ‘In theory, yes. But in practice, evidently not.’

  ‘First you tried to kill me, then you rescued me. Why?’

  He looked down at his dead cigarette which he carried on grinding into the ground. ‘Like you said. You’re my best fr
iend.’

  ‘You couldn’t bring yourself to kill me.’

  ‘Let’s put it like that.’ He looked up and smiled. ‘Shall we go and get some breakfast?’

  * * *

  —

  We went to Jake’s. I ordered an omelette, Peter ham and coffee.

  He must have thrown away the sunglasses and cap once we started running. Now, without them, I saw his hair was a slightly different shade of blond, and he had bags under eyes that had been as white as hard-boiled eggs but were now slightly dull and yellowish, with a fine tracery of veins running through them. Those teeth, however, were as white as ever.

  ‘Then if I’ve understood you correctly,’ I said, ‘I get Miriam and you’re unhappy for the rest of your life.’

  ‘That is highly likely but remember that this is a new universe I’m experiencing. All I know is that it has been the same up until the point at which I boarded it. Now, because of my transfer, there’s been a split.’

  ‘Is that why there’s an infinity of universes? People began moving between them, and that caused them to start splitting and –’

  ‘We don’t know. But it’s possible. Everything that can happen has happened. Perhaps originally there were only one or two universes, and then people discovered the passageways and the process of expansion began.’

  ‘In that case these universes are the creations of human beings.’

  ‘As opposed to?’

  ‘Natural creations. Or the result of physical laws.’

  ‘Humans are created by nature, which is created by physical laws. Everything is physics, Martin.’

  I could feel the phone vibrating in my pocket but let it ring.

  ‘So what are you going to do now?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m putting together a research team with the aim of finding out how to move to another universe. The research will go ahead more quickly now since I’m already familiar with most of the other research fields.’

  ‘And then you’ll travel to another universe and try to get Miriam there?’

  He nodded.

  The food arrived.

  Peter picked up the sharp steak knife, but then just looked down at his ham without touching it. ‘I really hope you get her, Martin. And I regret that I almost killed you.’ He put a note down on the table with his free hand. ‘Now I need to disappear. Good luck, my friend.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘What do you do after a bull run?’

  ‘You sleep.’

  ‘Then I’ll sleep.’ He moved the knife to his left hand, stood up, took hold of my right. ‘One more thing: don’t wake me. Stay away from the room at least until after dark, OK?’

  He squeezed my hand, let go of it, weaved his way out past the other guests and was gone.

  ‘Hey!’ I wanted to run after him, but a big, loud-mouthed American drunk wearing a panama hat was in my way. And when I finally reached the street Peter was nowhere in sight.

  When in doubt, go left. That was my father’s motto and I followed it. I ran, bumping into people, calling out Peter’s name. I passed the market square where they dived from the statue in the evening, not stopping until I reached the alcove by the statue of San Fermín.

  Peter was gone.

  I was so out of breath I had to support myself against the wall. That mean bastard. Regret, he’d said. He didn’t say he was sorry, he just regretted he had almost killed me.

  The phone vibrated again. I took it out, hoping it was Peter. A foreign number. Two SMSs.

  Do you really love me?

  And: Really, really?

  ‘Hola, Mister Famous!’

  I looked up from the phone and saw my two Spanish girlfriends from the village, arm in arm. The blonde came up and kissed me on both cheeks.

  ‘You must have been very afraid,’ she said. ‘And so lucky!’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘When you were saved from the bull.’

  ‘Oh…You were there?’

  ‘No, no. You are on TV. You are famous, Martin!’

  The girls laughed at what must have been the astonished look on my face before dragging me back to the bar I had just left. There, on the wall-mounted TV screen, highlights from the day’s bull run were being shown.

  ‘I didn’t even know they were filming it,’ I said.

  ‘Officially, running in front of the bulls is illegal, but it is of course understood that the police look the other way. But the national TV will broadcast the run. Welcome to Spain!’ They laughed until the tears ran down their cheeks and poured from their own sangria bottle into the bar’s glasses without the bartender seeming to object. I, meanwhile, was staring at the screen and watching myself run, with Peter in his sunglasses and cap right behind me. Suddenly I stumbled, but there were so many others in the line of fire it was impossible to see what it was that had tripped me. The camera was on the bull and I was no longer in view. Up until the point at which the bull stopped. And then I saw it: two men clambering up onto the top of the barricade behind the bull. One of them was Peter, still wearing the sunglasses and cap. And he jumped over to the other side and disappeared!

  The camera followed what the bull was looking at: me. And then a person who had been standing pressed up against the wall of the house right where I had landed, and who now stepped forward, grabbed round my leg with both hands and – as the bull charged towards me, horns lowered as though in search of something – swept the ground with me, and swung me round in an elegant semicircle, much as a matador swings the cape at such a sharp angle the charging bull hasn’t time to alter course.

  It was Peter. The other Peter. No, the third Peter. One who was even older than Peter the second. As I watched the distracted bull moving away and Peter the third and I disappear out of the picture I realised something. The reason Peter the third had said he regretted – the way you use that word when you’re apologising on behalf of others – was because Peter the second, absolutely and completely and with no regrets at all, had tried to kill me. Peter the third had not come to win Miriam but to save me.

  I swallowed.

  The bartender gave me an enquiring look.

  ‘Brandy,’ I said.

  * * *

  —

  ‘Where are you?’ asked Miriam.

  ‘At a party out in the country,’ I said, peering up at the sky. But the sun had just set and it was still too early for stars. I had made my excuses and left the market square where a local dance band was now playing. Stopped beside an olive tree with the houses and the distant hubbub behind me, and in front of me vines stretching in rows all the way to the mountains. And there in the dusk I had called her.

  ‘Are you drunk?’

  ‘A little,’ I said. ‘Have you spoken to Peter?’

  ‘He called Mamma, the crafty thing. She took the call, and because I was sitting right beside her she handed it to me. She doesn’t know anything. All she knows is she wants him for a son-in-law.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He knew I’d met you in San Sebastián. Asked if we’d had a good time. Said he’d lost sight of you during the bull run and that you still hadn’t returned to the hotel. I started to get worried when you didn’t answer my text messages. That’s why I called you.’

  ‘I noticed that.’

  ‘Why didn’t you ring back earlier?’

  ‘It’s been a…a hectic day. I’ll tell you about it later, I’ve got people waiting for me.’

  ‘Oh yeah? That’s what Peter said.’

  ‘What did Peter say?’

  ‘That you’d definitely end up at a party with some chicas. So I guess he was right…’

  Her tone of voice, half amused and half rebuking, made me smile.

  ‘Are you a bit jealous?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Martin.’

 
; ‘Say you’re a bit jealous. Just to make me feel good about myself.’

  ‘You are drunk.’

  ‘Say it. Please.’

  In the ensuing silence I listened. The song of the cicadas had ceased with the setting of the sun. Either that or they were singing the way they do where I come from: at such a high frequency the human ear can’t pick it up. I thought about it, about vibrations, about all the things going on around us that we neither see, nor hear, or even know about.

  ‘I’m a tiny bit jealous. Just for you.’ I closed my eyes. A warmth – maybe it was happiness – washed through me.

  ‘I’ll come back to San Sebastián again early tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Breakfast?’

  ‘A good breakfast?’

  ‘I’ll call you when I’m on the bus or the train.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  ‘And you?’

  No answer. She’d hung up. But I said it anyway.

  ‘I do. Really, really.’

  I had just put the phone back in my pocket when it rang again.

  ‘Yes?’ I answered, still smiling, but instead of Miriam it was a different female voice:

  ‘Mister Daas? This is Imma Aluariz with the San Sebastián police. Where are you right now?’

  My tongue felt dry, and I only just managed to resist the impulse to end the call at once.

  ‘I’m in Pamplona,’ I said. Vague enough, and not exactly a lie.

  ‘Me too,’ said Aluariz. ‘We need to talk to you.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘You know about what.’

  ‘Am I…a suspect or something?’

  ‘Where exactly can we find you, Mister Daas?’

  * * *

  —

  Two policemen – one in plain clothes, the other in uniform – led me from the car, past two other police cars in the direction of the house where Peter and I had rented rooms. The one in uniform lifted up the crime-scene tape, and we walked through the gate and then into the house. Instead of my own room they took me to Peter’s. They stopped me in the doorway. There were a number of people inside, two wearing white from head to foot. The bed was hidden by a short, stocky figure standing at the end of it.