Paradise Rot

by Jenny Hval

  A mattress in the northern mezzanine, next to the bathroom, is my bed. Across from me, above the entrance, is the mezzanine where Carral sleeps, and under it hangs an old chandelier that jingles when she turns in bed. Standing on the raised platform of my bedroom I can see above the boards and down into the kitchen, across to the open mezzanine and, if I stretch, right down to the toilet seat in the bathroom.

  ‘Do you know what kind of factory this used to be?’ I asked while I tossed my clothes onto the mezzanine. On the wall above the loft I’d seen big square pieces of metal and imagined they once had huge hooks or wax candles hanging from them. But Carral didn’t reply, and when I came downstairs to get some more clothes from the box on the floor, I saw that she was sat by the kitchen table with a thick book.

  ‘Did you say something?’ she asked.

  ‘I was just wondering what they used to make here.’

  ‘I’m not sure, but it’s been a while since there’s been any kind of industry in this area.’

  I nodded and Carral continued:

  ‘I wonder a lot about what they were thinking when they converted the place.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem quite finished.’

  ‘Not finished? I think it looks like a theatre set. I mean, like, plasterboard in the bathroom.’ She laughed and went back to her book.

  ‘What are you reading?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, just a romance. Kind of stupid. I studied literature a few years ago, and now I only read trash. I’m a hypocrite! Do you need help, by the way?’

  ‘No, you just read.’

  I went back to my pile of clothes. Carral kept reading. Sometimes she looked up to dunk her biscuit in a tea-cup, and from my mezzanine I could hear her suck tea from the biscuit and turn the page at regular intervals.

  The house was raw and porous. It didn’t shut out the world outside like the houses at home, and there was no paint or wallpaper anywhere, just naked boards and rough concrete walls. In the bathroom the walls were soft and damp. Dark mould spotted the corners. Norwegian houses, I explained to Carral, are hermetic, warm wooden tanks filled with colour, and Norwegian sounds are kept discrete by dry, well-insulated walls. In the factory, on the other hand, I only truly felt like I was inside when I slept and slumber put up its heavy impenetrable walls between the conscious world and me. Monday morning I woke very early to the clanking of bottles as the first drunks returned from the Aygros Supermarket around the corner. I stayed in bed and listened to the increasing rush: cars that drove up and up the spiralling ramp in the multistorey a few streets away; sidewalks being hosed down and swept; the trams hooting along on the main road. Maybe it wasn’t the house, but me that was porous, I thought. Maybe I had to grow a thicker skin in this town.

  In the living room on the open deck I sat down by the only exterior window. It was still early and up here I could look at the people and the fog and sometimes feel the morning sun on my face. Everywhere else there was just pale light from naked bulbs hanging from the ceiling on long wires. Like seismometers, they swayed at any movement in the house. Not even the big chandelier hanging under Carral’s bed gave much light. It didn’t do much more than reflect the sunlight from the window in its glass splinters and cast a dim glow of light on the kitchen floor. A fine shower of dust drifted to the floor when Carral stood up on the mezzanine.

  In the dim light, my hearing became more acute. The open factory brimmed with echoes. Waves of sound could persist and resonate between the walls, filling out the silence until other noises took over. When Carral zipped up her jacket and tied her shoelaces that morning, I could hear faint traces of her earlier activity: vague sonic contours of shower and toothbrush, yawning and chewing. When she left for the big Sachs & Sachs building where she worked, the shattering sound of the front door shutting was thousands of tiny marbles rolling through the house. I turned to the window to see her walk to the tram stop. There was no one else on the road. The broken windows of the building abutting the silos glittered in the sun.

  I hadn’t started on my reading list yet. There was no reason to delay. The semester began in earnest in a few days and I was tired of walking the streets. On the first page of the biology compendium it said in bold letters

  All natural objects belong to one of two primary categories: The non-living and the living. What we call biology is the study of the living.

  I liked what I read – the study of the living – and when I went downstairs to make tea, I noticed the living all around the house: a small white spider crawled on the windowsill, the boards bulged as if beetles and larvae were crawling inside them, and in the kettle on the kitchen counter the water had begun to bubble, a sign that I was among the living. While I considered whether I should put milk and sugar in my tea like a Brit, I repeated the words out loud: What we call biology is the study of the living, and after I had said it, it was almost as if I heard the words continue to move between the concrete walls, as if I stood in the wild between two cliffs listening to the echo. Did the beetles, the larvae, and the spiders hear it?

  When Carral came back and I looked up from my compendium, I was surprised to find it was already evening. Outside the window the sun had set, and the city’s contours were sketched out in electric light with the sea behind it like a black mouth. I climbed down to Carral from the living room as she arched her back and lifted a white carrier bag to the kitchen table.

  ‘Look what I got!’ she said, and from the top of the bag a whole pile of apples rolled out onto the kitchen table: coloured pink, burgundy red and gold. ‘They were being thrown out.’

  Together we put some in a fruit bowl and the rest in the fridge. Carral was clearly thinking that we would eat them all. ‘They just, like, lay there,’ she said. ‘Do you like apples?’

  I nodded. I liked the sound of Carral’s mouth as she took a huge bite out of one of the golden apples and crushed the sweet flesh between her teeth. The soft yellow of the peel was almost the same as her hair.

  ‘They have pretty names,’ she continued. ‘I saw in the shop. The pink ones are called Pink Ladies, and the yellow Honeygolds. Isn’t that nice?’

  ‘Very. What about the red ones, what are they called?’

  ‘That’s the best one. Bloody Ploughman.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said.

  Carral held up a red apple.

  ‘They look like the apples mum used to hang on the Christmas tree,’ she said.

  ‘Real apples?’

  ‘No, they were wooden, painted red. They looked so nice that I tried to eat them.’

  ‘Oh no!’

  ‘Oh yeah! I lost a tooth.’ She wiped her mouth and continued: ‘The day after I got an apple for pudding, a toffee apple, you know. Even though my mouth was really sore.’

  ‘Could you eat it?’

  ‘I licked it.’

  Carral took another bite of her Honeygold apple. Her teeth met resistance in the flesh, and I heard them push further in.

  ‘There’s a worm that eats apple cores, and sometimes drowns in fruit juice,’ I said while I crumpled up the empty apple bag. A whiff of apple rose from the bag and spread through the room, and I imagined that the smell seeped into the concrete walls and boards, into the kitchen chairs and the cutting board.

  ‘So far I’m good,’ she answered and smirked with apple juice bubbling between her teeth.

  When she chewed I could hear the sound of the fruit’s flesh dissolving into foam.

  I didn’t know then that the hiss and bubble from her mouth would soon be heard in other places, in ways I didn’t yet understand. An apple is never just an apple. Carral peeled a Honeygold, and long round coils of peel curled and fell on the kitchen table. I took a bite of a Bloody Ploughman. Even the flesh was red.

  ‘Bloody,’ Carral said.

  ‘Nice colour,’ I answered.

  ‘It looks sinful. I bet that was the apple Eve ate, you know, in the Bible, the forbidden fruit.’

  ‘Might be. But I’ve eaten some too now. Does that mean you
have to kick me out of your house?’

  I held the half-eaten apple out to her. She burst out laughing and pointed out at the factory: ‘Does this look like Paradise or what?’

  It was evening. Carral chitchatted and leafed through a glossy magazine while chewing on her thumb nail. The apples rubbed gently against each other in the cupboard and in the bowl. The glass shards in the chandelier clinked. In my biology compendium I read a chapter on extinct sea creatures. The TV was muted and flickered behind my back, reflected on the railing. And all the while I could hear this hiss and bubble that I still didn’t understand, as if we were far down on a quiet seabed and listening to wind howling on the surface.

  When Carral went to bed, I heard fabric against skin and fabric against fabric as she undressed behind the wall on her mezzanine. She’d left her thick book on the kitchen table. It had a faint fruity smell.

  ‘Good night,’ I said.

  And night came and went. Next morning it was raining, and I woke up to the drumbeat of raindrops on the roof, the pattering noise never quite keeping a rhythm. Through the drumming something else could be heard: apple skin against wood, rolling through the kitchen, back and forth, like eggs ready to hatch.

  The Fruitpearls

  A WEEK CAME AND WENT. I walked through the wide white aisles of the Aygros Supermarket, buying yoghurt, cheese and milk that looked nothing like the yoghurt, cheese and milk from home. Everything was fattier, sweeter, saltier, bigger. At university I filled my schedule with Biology of Cells and Organisms and Genetics and The Evolution of Life. In my first lecture I learned that millions of years ago Aybourne and most of the surrounding landmass had been below water. The professor explained how the ground had been covered by a thick layer of limestone formed by billions of tiny little algae skeletons.

  ‘Think about it,’ he continued eagerly, ‘if the water was still here, only a few church spires and the City Hall clock tower would reach above the surface.’

  Afternoons I spent with Franziska on the lawn outside Earth Sciences.

  ‘Are you enjoying your factory?’

  ‘Yeah, I like it,’ I answered.

  ‘It seems really strange. You said there are no walls?’

  I picked at the sugar on my napkin from a cinnamon doughnut. The sugar crystals stuck to my fingertip.

  ‘Only thin plasterboard. It’s weird, but it’s ok.’ I put my finger in my mouth and crushed the sugar between my teeth.

  ‘I don’t think I could live like that.’

  ‘Me neither, really,’ I answered.

  But I did live in this factory, and I’d started to like it. I enjoyed listening to Carral’s sounds, how she shuffled across the kitchen floor or dried off with a towel after she’d showered. From my bed I could hear her pee at night, a faint, muted trickling against the toilet bowl, which made me imagine, half-asleep, thin flowing golden ribbons.

  Gradually I got used to listening to the factory and Carral and the whole district, and one morning I didn’t wake up when the Aygros Supermarket opened. I no longer heard the cars in the car park at night. And in a similar way I grew accustomed to all of Aybourne, and I no longer missed the taste of brown bread and liver paste, and I poured the right amount of milk in my tea without thinking about how I didn’t used to drink tea with milk back in Norway. When I walked towards the kitchen table and sat down with my milky tea, the floorboards creaked just as they did in response to Carral’s pattering feet.

  The apples spread all over the flat. Half-rotten fruit was left in the bin, on dirty plates and in used coffee mugs. Some apples were left forgotten on the bigger mezzanine, others rolled into corners and under cupboards. Every morning while tying up her shoelaces and buttoning her jacket, Carral put an apple for lunch on the chest of drawers by the front door. Every morning she forgot it. Every evening she took a bite of an apple as she came home, and left it on the kitchen table or the bench. Sometimes I sat and watched the apple; how the juices dribbled from the bite marks. I wondered what was apple juice and what was her spit, and thought about licking the place where she’d bit to see if I could tell the difference. But I didn’t. I continued to study it, watching the flesh turn yellow and then brown.

  After a week the remaining apples had turned soft, and we stopped eating them. Instead I used my fingernails to make patterns in the skin of a Honeygold while I read Introductory Mycology:

  But what are fungi? Traditionally, biologists have defined fungi as eukaryote, organisms that produce spores and that reproduce sexually and asexually.

  When I looked up from the book, I saw that I’d made a little circle-shaped nail mark in the middle of the yellow apple. The edges had already dried up, and the tear was brown, a small dark nipple in the golden skin. My fingers smelled of yeast.

  When I returned home from that week’s last lecture, I found Carral and a pile of apples on the floor. She had tried to collect them and put them back in the bag, but the bag had torn and the apples were rolling everywhere.

  ‘They stink,’ she said, picking up a Pink Lady apple and squeezing it until the skin burst. The fermented pulp oozed over her hand. She dropped the apple and shook her fingers. Muscles tensed in her arm and in her neck under her yellow curls.

  ‘They’re just a little old,’ I said.

  ‘They’re not that old,’ she replied and picked up a new carrier bag from the drawer. ‘And they’re rotten already.’

  ‘They were old when you got them. All fruit rots when it gets old.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said.

  I walked towards her and picked up the apple she had dropped. It was yellow-brown and shiny around the tear in the peel. ‘It’s when they tear that they go mouldy,’ I explained to Carral and pointed to the tear. ‘Look.’

  ‘Just throw it out,’ she said. ‘Some previous tenant left a composter outside.’

  ‘I’ll take them.’

  She held the bag while I put the apples in it, yellow-brown and red, soft and wet. I got them from the cupboards, the mezzanine and from the kitchen bench, I picked up the apples that had fallen to the floor and rolled along the floorboards. A sticky dark-red Bloody Ploughman got stuck to my hand, and I thought about Carral’s comment about Eve and the forbidden fruit; imagining I was cleaning up after the Fall.

  In the compost outside the apples looked like jewels in a jewellery box. I closed the container carefully and sat on the lid. Carral smoked a cigarette on the stair. She smiled groggily.

  ‘Sorry I got stressed out. I don’t like rotten things.’

  I looked down on the compost lid underneath me, as if to make sure the apples stayed there.

  ‘It’s been a while since I lived with someone.’

  ‘Is it weird to share again?’

  ‘It’s fine, it’s just kind of new. The apartment feels … different.’

  ‘Smaller, perhaps?’

  ‘Maybe. Or just unfamiliar.’

  ‘It gets crowded quickly,’ I said. ‘With all those apples.’

  She laughed and put the cigarette out under her shoe.

  We leave the front door open. The fermented smell disappears over the doorstep, mixes with rain and wind and the tram’s whining progress. All that’s left is the trail of brown juice on the bench and seeds between the floorboards. But my dreams are full of apples, and in the dark my body slowly transforms into fruit: tonsils shrinking to seeds and lungs to cores. I dream of white flowers blossoming under my nails, as if under ice. Then my nails break, opening up like clams and in the finger flesh there are little sticky fruit pearls.

  The Double Sleep

  THE SIGHT OF HER startled me. I couldn’t quite believe she had been sitting in the same room for half an hour without me realising. It looked like she was sleeping, but maybe she’d been sitting there with her eyes closed, listening to the sounds I make only when I’m alone: the sound of my fingers scratching thick pubic hair, lips slipping apart in small sighs, the elastic in my underpants snapping against my skin as my hand slides free. Carral sat on
the mezzanine stairs, only a couple of metres away. She supported her head gently on the railing, silent as furniture. Eyes closed, lips pushed together. Not a muscle moved. Not a joint clicked. I quickly closed my flies while I looked at her. Her head kept nodding. Her collarbone protruded each time.

  Carral’s bobbing head didn’t break her sleep. It was as if she dreamt of sleeping and being awoken, trapped in a double sleep. I finished reading the chapter in my biology compendium, mostly so she wouldn’t think she’d scared me, and afterwards I went downstairs to the kitchen and started preparing vegetables on the counter. At first I moved quietly so as not to wake her, moving crabwise between the fridge and the stove, dicing and peeling slowly and silently. But then I grew tired of her weird sleeping and began to make more noise. I turned on the radio, chopped onions and potatoes hard and fast, frying them up in the pan. Still no sound came from the stairs. Why didn’t she wake up? Was she trying to get to me, make me self-conscious? At this thought, I made an effort to be even louder. But it wasn’t until I’d served the food, put the kettle on – Carral long since given up on – that I heard anything from her. A long yawn sounded through the metal pipes in the railings, a finger joint clicked, a cotton sweater stretched, feet shuffled down the stairs. When I turned around, she was gone.

  A little later she came and sat by the kitchen table. I was eating.

  ‘Did you fall asleep on the mezzanine today?’ I asked.

  ‘I guess I did,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I don’t sleep too well at night.’

  She was wearing that thin pale-yellow wool sweater again. The yellow was so close to her skin tone and hair that she seemed naked, a sexless, matted nakedness. I cut the yolk from my fried egg and put it in my mouth. The yolk burst under my tongue, and I imagined it was her skin I was tasting, but she didn’t move, just continued to twirl a finger in her ponytail, looking down at the novel opened in front of her. I licked the sticky yellow from my teeth.