CoDex 1962

by Sjón

  Not one of her four “flings” had satisfied her – true, she has yet to experience that pleasure with anyone but herself – but there will be time enough for that later; tonight she has achieved what she set out to do. There’s no turning back. From now on she is going to make full use of the newfound freedom that the events of the night have kindled in her breast. Without putting on a stitch of clothing, Mrs Thorsteinson leaves the bedroom.

  She pads around the flat, watching her naked body moving from room to room, admiring her reflection in hall mirror, bathroom cabinet, the glazed doors of the kitchen units, the window panes of the darkened dining room, the photo frame on the sideboard in the drawing room containing her in-laws’ wedding picture – the only trace that remains of them in the reception rooms – until she is standing in the doorway of her husband’s bedroom.

  The hall light casts her shadow into the room, stretching it across the floor and up the length of Mr Thorsteinson’s bed until its head is resting on the pillow. That’s the closest she intends to get to his bed from now on. Although you can hardly move in there for all the furniture and other bits and bobs that used to belong to the old couple, she can’t immediately see anything to reflect herself in. Gripping the handle, she takes a step backwards and is about to close the door when she notices a small ray of light flickering on the black triangle between her legs. It’s the hall light bouncing off some round object that is peeping out of one of the countless drawers in the bureau – the nerve centre of her father-in-law’s one-time fishing empire – which is now wedged between wardrobe and grandfather clock:

  The old man’s monocle.

  A laugh escapes her when she works out the source of the beam. However tiny, her naked reflection is there in the eye-piece.

  And the very second it dawns on her that, however unexpectedly and indirectly, the sanctimonious ship-owner Thorsteinson has achieved what he failed to do in life – to see her naked – I imagine it happening: yes, I dare say that in the very instant that Dísa’s body shook with cold laughter, deep in her womb, awash with male outpourings, the silent event took place: an egg from her left ovary was fertilised. And with that the first child of 1962 began its development.’

  * * *

  ‘This conception was all the more remarkable since, owing to the unpredictable nature of the female body, a rare event occurred in Dísa “herring” Thorsteinson’s womb: sperm from each of the four men with whom she’d had intercourse that night succeeded in entering her egg, but instead of splitting into four and embarking on the development of quadruplets, the egg closed around the genes from the testicles of the taxi driver Örn Ragnarsson, the apprentice typesetter Fáfnir Hermannsson, the ex-con Jón “Bull” Thorgeirsson and Carl Steinsson, second mate of the coastguard ship Freyr, to create a female embryo of unique complexity.’

  ‘Was there a notice about it in the papers? FIRST CHILD OF 1962! Accompanied by a photo?’

  ‘Mr Thorsteinson didn’t want that.’

  ‘Did he know how the child had been conceived?’

  ‘He must have known he wasn’t the father. But that wasn’t the reason: in the middle of the girl’s forehead was a round birthmark that made her look like the child of a savage, marked out for the gods with a purple sun of eagle blood and soot. But the Thorsteinson family were Christians.’

  * * *

  ‘The starting gun had been raised, the shot fired.’

  3

  ‘This ushered in the time of mass copulation, the conception of the 4,711 children – 2,410 boys and 2,301 girls – who were born alive in 1962: night and day, morning and evening, on weekdays and holidays, in lunch hours and coffee breaks, smoking breaks and school breaks, during mountain hikes and country dances; in the upper echelons of society as in the lower, and not least in between; outside in the open air – where the mountain’s high and the valley’s deep, on tender nights beside the silvery sea, when the stars begin to fall, in that good old mountain dew, when skies are grey, where skies are blue, in that twilight time, with the Northern Lights a runnin’ wild, when snow falls all around, by the old dirt road, where the Hagi bus stops and goes – and inside, in garages and apartment blocks, office buildings and shops, factories and sheds, ski huts and carpenters’ workshops, art galleries and warehouses, country cabins and boarding schools, fish factories and petrol stations, fishermen’s huts and cinemas, net sheds and dairies, clothes shops and school buildings, knitting factories and mail-boats; reclining on teachers’ desks and in grassy dells, on the floors of cloakrooms, bathrooms and pantries, on sandy beaches, living-room sofas and rag rugs, in bathtubs, hot tubs and swimming pools, under shop counters, billiard tables and birch shrubs; sitting in armchairs and dentists’ chairs, on stony beaches, church pews, garden furniture and apple crates; standing against car doors, front doors and washing machines, bookcases, kitchen shelves and churchyard walls, there met in long, wet kisses the lips of electricians and schoolmistresses, air hostesses and cobblers, journalists and doctors’ receptionists, actresses and milk-lorry drivers, vicars and schoolgirls, fish-factory women and paediatricians; there clothes were stripped off by fortune tellers, deckhands, bakery girls, barbers, seamstresses, joiners, midwives, bank clerks, hairdressers, warehouse managers, waitresses, foremen, cook-housekeepers and draughtsmen; while, with hesitant fumbling fingers, farmers, engineers, plumbers, bus drivers and watchmakers groped for the hooks on the bras of switchboard operators, hired hands, housewives and nannies prior to fondling their warm, soft, oval breasts; the members of 4,661 men stiffened and the vulvas of 4,661 women (there were fifty pairs of twins) grew wet; husbands lay with wives, lovers with mistresses, husbands with mistresses, lovers with wives – and also wives with mistresses, lovers with husbands, mistresses with mistresses, lovers with lovers, though these unions produced no offspring other than enduring memories of the coupling; rapists assaulted their victims; fingers, lips and tongues stroked erogenous zones; penises were rubbed, licked and sucked; buttocks were gripped; backs were clawed; wet pussies enclosed hard cocks; hymens tore; ejaculations were premature; orgasms were achieved, and women took on board the nineteen litres of sperm that were required to produce the 4,711 children to which they were to give birth in 1962.’

  The Dance

  The curtain is raised. Fluorescent bulbs bloom into life in a series of clicks and flashes, and in their illumination there appear in the middle of the stage twelve cots and twenty-one oxygen tents lined up in two rows. The cots, plain, everyday affairs, are on wheels. The oxygen tents stand on white-painted steel legs. Eight of the cots are covered with light blue, loose-knit woollen blankets, four with pink. This is the chorus:

  Girl: 12 January 1962 –✝13 January 1962

  Girl: 13 January 1962 –✝13 January 1962

  Girl: 21 January 1962 –✝21 January 1962

  Boy: 24 February 1962 –✝27 February 1962

  Boy: 1 March 1962 –✝14 April 1962

  Girl: 13 May 1962 –✝14 May 1962

  Girl: 13 May 1962 –✝17 May 1962

  Girl: 5 May 1962 –✝21 May 1962

  Boy: 7 May 1962 –✝25 May 1962

  Girl: 19 May 1962 –✝26 May 1962

  Girl: 27 May 1962 –✝27 May 1962

  Girl: 28 May 1962 –✝29 May 1962

  Boy: 22 June 1962 –✝23 June 1962

  Boy: 27 June 1962 –✝30 June 1962

  Boy: 10 February 1962 –✝11 July 1962

  Girl: 30 April 1962 –✝11 July 1962

  Boy: 10 February 1962 –✝16 July 1962

  Boy: 16 July 1962 –✝16 July 1962

  Boy: 9 July 1962 –✝18 July 1962

  Girl: 19 July 1962 –✝19 July 1962

  Boy: 31 July 1962 –✝31 July 1962

  Girl: 1 August 1962 –✝1 August 1962

  Boy: 29 March 1962 –✝3 August 1962

  Boy: 9 July 1962 –✝4 August 1962

  Girl: 13 February 1962 –✝7 August 1962

  Boy: 1 July 1962 –✝18 August 1962

&n
bsp; Boy: 17 August 1962 –✝20 August 1962

  Girl: 3 September 1962 –✝3 September 1962

  Boy: 1 October 1962 –✝6 October 1962

  Boy: 18 November 1962 –✝18 November 1962

  Boy: 27 November 1962 –✝27 November 1962

  Boy: 18 December 1962 –✝18 December 1962

  Girl: 16 December 1962 –✝23 December 1962

  At first silence reigns. The odd high-pitched, fretful cry, brief sigh or feeble whimper emanates randomly from a cot here, a cot there. There’s a low humming from the oxygen tents.

  Then the boy who lived for two days in May raises his voice. His weeping is bitter, his voice hollow. He is the precentor. The first to join in with him is the oldest member of the chorus, a girl who lived to the age of twenty-three weeks. Then, one after the other, the rest of the children chime in. The wailing spreads from cot to cot and echoes in the oxygen tents. The small bodies shake, their lower lips tremble, their curled fists beat the air (so tiny, so tiny), their frail blue legs twitch in aimless kicks. With mumbling and sighing, grizzling and hiccupping sobs, they perform the first movement of the choral work:

  — We were stillborn, premature, the umbilical cord wrapped round our necks, our endocrine systems defunct, our intestines blocked, our brains damaged, our lungs collapsed.

  We departed as quickly as we arrived.

  Dear brothers and sisters, born in 1962, we await you here.

  4

  ‘GOD’S BLOOD

  The instant the word sprang to His lips, God acquired sight. He saw that He was omnipresent. He saw Himself from every angle, from above and below, from all sides at once. And as God had no awareness of up or down, here or there – everything was simultaneously the beginning and the end – His consciousness was whole and undivided, while being present in every nook and cranny of the world that was coming into being. (Stone axe–microchip.) He was both one and many. His mouths opened.

  10-47 seconds after the light had begun to flow it reached God’s eyes wherever He was present. The glare was so dazzling that He instinctively raised a hand to shield them. (Mosaic–Marburg virus–parrot feathers.) But just as an infinite number of hands were passing an infinite number of mouths on their way to shield the countless eyes, the light fell on the back of God’s hand, and to His astonished delight it passed right through, streaming red from His palm.

  The blood-coloured radiance was easy on the eye. God moved His hand back to His mouth and held it there. As the vapour of His breath blended with the colour, phenomena began to appear through a pink haze. (Nervous system of an earthworm–galaxy cluster MS 0735.)

  Out in the cold black void, the light projected images made of the incomprehensible substance from which the Creator had created Himself.

  And God is still holding His mighty hand before His mouth.

  * * *

  The accompaniment to the protracted groans of lust and childbirth that echoed in Iceland from 1 April 1961 to the close of 1962 was no different from the everyday symphony that generally heralds the arrival of a whole year’s cohort of children: the booming of car and tractor engines intermingled with the humming and whining of domestic appliances and plant machinery on the one hand, and the shouts and calls, clapping and stamping of humans on the other; the belching and farting of kids in school playgrounds, swimming pools and back gardens found an echo in the cursing and swearing, throat-clearing and coughing, laughter and gasping of spectators at sports meetings, theatres and sheep round-ups; jazz, classical and pop music emanating from dance halls, music schools and gramophones mingled with the clatter of crockery, the burble of the radio news and conversations in workplaces, cafés and homes about affairs major and minor, domestic and foreign – all of which is well documented in autobiographical novels in which every sentence and paragraph glistens with the poignant tears of happy nostalgia shed by their authors: 200 porpoises run aground on Bardaströnd; Yuri Gagarin is the first man in space; Askja erupts; the Berlin Wall is built; the Duke of St Kilda sings for Reykjavík’s tax director; Marilyn Monroe is found dead in bed; neo-Nazis hold a march in Fossvogur Cemetery; Watson, Crick and Wilkins win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; lightning strikes the cowshed at Nedri-Hóll in the Stadarsveit district killing five cows; the Soviets build missile launch pads in Cuba; the Morgunbladid newspaper’s April Fool’s joke is the discovery of the saga hero Egill Skallagrímsson’s hidden silver; Ringo Starr quits as drummer of Rory Storm and the Hurricanes; Adolf Eichmann is hanged in Israel; Hótel Saga is built in Reykjavík’s Melar district; Yuri Gagarin visits Iceland, only coming up to the shoulder of the newly crowned Miss Iceland when photographed with her at the airport; the Telstar communications satellite is launched and television images are broadcast between continents for the first time; the first issue of the Spiderman comic is published by Marvel, and so on and so forth – in all respects but one: in the twenty months during which that year’s quota of children was conceived and born, the vault of heaven rumbled with the most powerful nuclear explosions ever seen or heard on earth.

  Night after night, man-made Northern Lights shimmered in the skies over Siberia, over atolls in the Pacific, while by day corpse lights flared against the clouds, lights so powerful that they appeared as bright as the sun from 1,500 kilometres away. Every third day, for 690 days in a row, nuclear devices were detonated above ground, 139 by the Soviets, 86 by the Americans, 225 in all – with a combined explosive charge of 245,000 kilotons or 7,000 times the power of Little Boy and Fat Boy, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including, as they did, both Tsar Bomba and Starfish Prime, one of which caused the biggest explosion of all time on earth, the other in the skies.

  Yes, never before or since have the mighty war drums of the superpowers been beaten more frenetically or with graver intent. By the end of 1962, the radiation in Iceland’s atmosphere had reached unprecedented levels.

  What happened was inevitable:

  Children of the 1962 generation mutated…’

  II

  From tape a)

  (17 June 2009)

  5

  The midnight sun gleams on the still waters of Lake Thingvellir, doubling the island of Sandey in the middle and tinting with purple the high rock wall of the Almannagjá Ravine.

  The geneticist raises his glass to eye level, squinting through it above the fiery-brown, fifty-year-old Japanese single malt – a gift from the CEO of the drugs giant Hoffmann-La Roche’s Northern European group while they were still on speaking terms. Luckily he’d stashed it away in the boathouse and forgotten all about it during the seven fat years, only to find it again this evening among the containers of turpentine and brush cleaner, and the empty wine bottles. Who would give him a gift like that today? He frames the view with his glass, lining up the surface of the whisky with that of the lake before raising it to his lips, taking a mouthful and swallowing it slowly, mentally calculating the cost as he returns the glass to the table beside the bottle. The name of the whisky is sandblasted on the side in Japanese and English, together with the year 2005 and the minimum price of ¥1,000,000.

  — Seven millilitres, ten thousand yen …

  The sound of his voice, emerging unnaturally loudly in the evening stillness, startles the geneticist; he hadn’t meant to speak out loud. He is alone on the deck down by the boathouse – away over in the cottage among the birch trees, he can hear the guests enjoying themselves: friends of his fourth wife Dóra, mingling with a bunch of celebrities from the media, entertainment and art worlds, people who accepted an invitation to the annual 17 June party only because his name was on the card; people she describes as friends of theirs whenever their names crop up in conversation with members of her old sewing circle, though the same names fill her with nothing but contempt when she comes across them in reports of premieres, openings and concerts or on the covers of the gossip rags – so he finishes his thought, saying:

  — Ten thousand yen, fifteen thousand krónur …

  Waves
lap at the rusted tracks that run from the boathouse down to the water. The carriage still sitting on them has fallen apart beneath the rotting planks of the Birna, his father’s old rowing boat. He used to go out fishing for trout in her with his father and three brothers, first as a tow-headed five-year-old and, for the last time, at twenty-four, when he and his father rowed out on to the lake together and, despite having recently graduated from medical school, he hadn’t a clue what to do when the oars slipped from his father’s hands and his body sagged gently forwards off the thwart into his son’s arms, a sudden death – but even in the manner of his passing the old man had almost certainly trumped anything his son would ever achieve, since there was something historic about dying in full view of the ancient Icelandic assembly site, the Law Rock, the ruins of Snorri Sturluson’s booth; it hinted at the fulfilment of a life’s vocation, and indeed this became a leitmotif in the obituaries for the author, radio broadcaster and Socialist Party MP who had, in all he did, placed the independence of his country and people before himself – whereas these days the crumbling boat merely served as a reminder of all the hours the geneticist had promised to spend with his younger son restoring it, making it watertight, painting and re-launching it, but which he had in fact spent dashing around the world, peddling the ‘Northern Lights’ that shimmered in the Icelanders’ genes.

  — Ten thousand krónur …

  He takes a sip, a little smaller than the first. Then adds at a pitch designed to carry to an absent audience:

  — This is where I became the man I am …

  The geneticist falls silent and glances at the tape recorder on the table beside the whisky. It’s an old Norelco 95 dictaphone that he bought on Saturday, 25 September 1976, the day before he started work in the Neurology Department at the University of Chicago Medical Center. The machine, cutting-edge technology in its day, had been a pricey purchase for a medical student on a tight budget, but Anna, his first wife, had urged him to buy it, aware that he wouldn’t rest until he had got one, if a ‘portatape’ was what it took to make him feel on an equal footing with the senior consultant in his department: he couldn’t care less about the more junior doctors, let alone his fellow students, always comparing himself to the man at the top, a position he intended to occupy himself one day. That Saturday they had taken the train down to Logan Square and bought the dictaphone from Abt’s Electronics, and Anna hadn’t so much as batted an eyelid when he went for the most expensive model. He often missed the ease with which she had been able to read him, the simple ploys she had used to prepare him for new situations and prevent him from falling out with people who couldn’t tell the difference between scientific fervour and ordinary arrogance. In a perfect world she would have accepted his invitation to become his secretary after their divorce.