The Fifth Element

by Jorgen Brekke

  “Sorry. I guess this isn’t a good time for me to drop by,” he said, though he didn’t budge from the doorway. “Rough night?”

  Evidently the deaf old guy hadn’t heard all the commotion in his room.

  Knut wiped the blood from his nose.

  “You should stuff some cotton up your nose,” said the old geezer. “That helps.”

  “What was it you wanted to see me about?” Knut said as politely as the situation allowed. He picked up a towel from the floor and wrapped it around his waist.

  “It’s that time of month, you know. Rent is due,” said the landlord.

  Panic seized hold of Knut at the thought of more due dates. The only one he could focus on right now was the one in a week’s time.

  “Oh. Right. I’ll bring it right over.”

  Knut stood where he was, feeling dazed and dizzy, as if his blood was having trouble flowing back down from his head into his body after dangling from the ceiling. He was also bruised and hungover, and he could use something other than cotton up his nose.

  His eyes suddenly fell on the copy of Adresseavisen from February 15, 2011. It was the newspaper that Sving had brought in. He blinked twice, realizing now that it was over. His days as a dumb and happy student stopped right now. Everything stopped. At this instant.

  He was looking at the headline: STUDENT DIES IN MYSTERIOUS FALL NEAR ROSENBORG PARK.

  Underneath it said:

  A young law student died last night after falling from the balcony of his apartment by Rosenborg Park. The police are treating his death as suspicious, but as yet they have no hard evidence of foul play.

  The photograph showed the apartment complex in Rosenborg. No one needed to tell Knut who that law student was. He knew without reading the rest of the article.

  His knees buckled. His heavy body was suddenly too much for them to bear. He collapsed onto the floor and lay there on his stomach. A moment later he got onto his knees and vomited, then kept on heaving. It was like having cramps from laughing too hard, except it hurt. Finally, it stopped and he lay back down, his mouth wide open.

  After a while he finally stood up, got dressed, and went out.

  He grabbed his bike from where he’d parked it in Gjessing’s garage. Then he headed down the steep streets of the Singsaker residential district toward Rosenborg Park. When he got there, he didn’t dare ring the bell. Instead, he rolled his bike in between the buildings to a small hill behind with a cluster of trees, some benches, and a flagpole on top. From here he had a view of the Kristiansten Fortress. But more importantly, from here he could see right into Jonas’s apartment.

  Knut could see it even before he parked his bike. Police tape had been strung up between two lampposts that lined the path under Jonas’s apartment. From the lampposts, the tape was stretched over to the wall, blocking off the area directly under his friend’s balcony. In the middle Knut could see some red patches on the ground. They were small, but big enough for him to tell they were blood. Inside on the wood floor of the apartment, where he had danced so often over the past few months, two white-clad men wearing rubber gloves were moving about. He couldn’t see their feet, but he knew they were wearing blue plastic booties. These guys had to be the police crime scene techs. He let go of his bike without using the kickstand, and it toppled over onto the slope as he sank onto a bench. He pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms around them as he rocked back and forth. That sick fucker had killed Jonas. There was no longer any doubt. That bastard had thrown his friend off the balcony. Why else would he bring a copy of the newspaper with him? Obviously he wanted Knut to see the news. The article hadn’t mentioned Jonas by name. It was too soon for that. He’d died yesterday, yet early enough for the newspaper to print the news in the morning edition. While Knut was still out partying, blissfully ignorant of what had happened, not knowing that Jonas was gone. Suspicious death. He thought about that phrase. There was nothing suspicious about it. Jonas had been killed by the man who called himself Sving, the man who was now after Knut. What he really wanted to do was scream at the top of his lungs. But he couldn’t. He didn’t want to attract attention from the police inside the building. In fact, he needed to get out of there before they noticed him.

  * * *

  So how much money did he actually have? None? To be honest, he really had no idea. There had been so little reason to worry about trivial matters like that. He’d had a bunch of cash on him yesterday when he was at … where was it now? That place where he’d gone dancing with that lame chick who didn’t come home with him? He couldn’t remember. Didn’t really matter.

  He checked his bank account online. Eleven thousand Norwegian kroner. He got ten thousand from his father every month. His next rent payment was due. He’d squandered most of his student loan long ago. When he got back to his place, he went through his jackets and found seven thousand kroner in the inside pocket of his down jacket. Probably payment for a sale that he’d forgotten about. He collected another three thousand from the pockets of other jackets and a couple of hundred in various pants. Altogether he had a total of twenty-one thousand. His rent was six thousand a month. Gjessing insisted on cash, always cash. Knut decided that six thousand kroner was so far from a quarter million that he might as well pay the rent. It made little difference if he had twenty-one or fifteen banknotes with Edvard Munch’s picture on them when he owed two hundred and fifty of them to a psychopath with friends like Sving. Small change wouldn’t do him any good. He needed a fucking miracle.

  He clutched the money in his hand and, strangely enough, felt a surge of hope. Hope was his thing, blind and reckless hope, pale and paralyzing.

  He went into the bathroom and took a shower. Tried to rub off the thought of Jonas and an image that had settled in his mind of the lifeless body underneath the balcony where he’d seen the police tape. He pictured it in various crumpled positions, lying on patches of blood. He wished he could wipe the image away by rinsing his throat. But he couldn’t. He was never going to be rid of it.

  * * *

  “Come in!” Gjessing shouted shrilly through the keyhole.

  A double oak door led into his living room.

  He was sitting in the dim light with the curtains drawn. They were old and dusty, looking as if they hadn’t been touched since Gjessing’s wife had died. The folds were stiff with age, with thin strips of sun in between. Dust motes whirled in the sunlight, trembling like heart murmurs.

  “I’ve brought the money,” said Knut.

  What am I doing here? he asked himself.

  “Good. You look better. Did you find some cotton?”

  “Cotton? Oh, sure, right. The bleeding stopped by itself.”

  “Do you often have nosebleeds?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I have a nephew whose nose would bleed if you just looked at him. Back when he was a kid, I mean.”

  Knut laughed without knowing why. How could he be laughing after what had just happened?

  “He doesn’t bleed as much anymore. He’s a lot more serious nowadays.”

  Knut was taken aback.

  “Is there a connection between nosebleeds and seriousness that I’m not getting?”

  “Of course.”

  Again Knut couldn’t help laughing at what the old man had said. It wasn’t rude laughter. Nor would he call it amiable laughter. Just casual. Disarming. Giving no indication of what he’d just been through.

  “You’re a sanguine fellow,” said Gjessing.

  “Me? Hardly. You should hear me sing. I only sing at parties, and then only drinking songs.” That was true. It was a custom he’d acquired back home.

  “I didn’t say you were a singing fellow. I said you’re sanguine.”

  “Oh, sanguine. Not a word I hear very often. I’ve heard it before, but what exactly does it mean?”

  “Come over here and sit down.” Gjessing pointed to an armchair with velour upholstery.

  Knut was afraid that his landlord’s wife might have been t
he last person to sit in that chair. She had died more than ten years ago. Or was it twenty? Nevertheless, he sat down, relieved to see that the chair would hold his weight. Actually, it was quite comfortable. It hardly creaked at all. The velour tickled the back of his neck.

  “A sanguine person is an eternal optimist.”

  “That’s me in a nutshell,” replied Knut, even though he was feeling the opposite right now. How could he ever be optimistic again with Jonas lying in the morgue, or wherever it was the police stored bodies in this town?

  “Have you heard of the four bodily fluids?”

  He was familiar with bodily fluids. Of course he was. A man like him. But it was news to him that there were four.

  “Would you like something to drink? There’s tea in the pot.” Gjessing pointed to a flower-patterned pot on the coffee table. “You’ll find cups in the sideboard.” Again the old man pointed. His finger was pale, with thin blue veins. His nails were gray like hardened chewing gum.

  “There’s port wine too. If it’s not too early in the day for you.”

  Knut got up and went over to the sideboard to get out the port wine.

  “We could do with a glass, don’t you think?” he said.

  Gjessing smiled.

  “Don’t see why not.”

  Knut held the bottle in his hand as he surveyed the volumes in the bookcase next to the sideboard. It was a low bookcase made of dark, polished wood. Three rows of leather-bound books. For some strange reason he was in the mood for a chat. It wouldn’t take his mind off Jonas entirely, but he also had his own problems to solve. He needed to come up with some ideas, plain and simple. And he had no clue where to find them.

  “Lots of old books here,” he said.

  He saw titles and author names that he’d never seen before. All the books were in English, arranged alphabetically by author. He ran his fingers over the spines. Paused to read some of them. He’d always enjoyed looking at the book spines on other people’s bookshelves. Sometimes he thought he’d read more outsides than the insides of books. But he’d always been more interested in what was possible than what was real. What he could experience meant more to him than what he’d actually experienced. It was the same with reading. He liked the titles of Gjessing’s books.

  The Worm of Midnight by Edgar Allan Poe. Songs of the Long Land by Lallafa. History of a Land Called Uqbar by Silas Haslam. A Princess Among Slaves by Sir Elmer Bole. In a Network of Lines That Intersect by Ermes Marana. One Human Minute by J. Johnson and S. Johnson. And Necronomicon by Abdul al-Hazred.

  What he liked best was the fact that he’d never heard of any of these books before. For him, they could just as well be the working titles of books that he hadn’t yet written.

  “Lots of interesting books here.”

  “Very interesting, if I do say so myself.” Gjessing was looking at Knut with those colorless old man’s eyes of his.

  Knut pulled a book from the shelf, turned to the title page, and read aloud:

  “The Anatomy of Melancholy, What It Is: With All the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of It. In Three Maine Partitions with Their Several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up.”

  “It has a certain flair to it! They really knew how to come up with titles in the old days. Today we simply call that book The Anatomy of Melancholy,” said Gjessing. “Written by Robert Burton. Odd that you should select that particular book. It’s about one of the four bodily fluids: black bile, melas choli, as it’s called in Greek. Bring it over here and sit down.”

  Knut carried the book in one hand, the wine bottle and two glasses in the other.

  He wondered again what he was doing here. He’d come over to pay the rent and then was going to go back to his room. To think. To come up with a solution. But how was he going to find it? A quarter million kroner? His father would die if he asked for that kind of money. Not that the old man didn’t have it. But he couldn’t ask him. That was impossible. How would he explain the situation? Nothing like this would ever happen in his father’s world. Never. He wouldn’t give Knut even one øre.

  “Phlegm, black bile, blood, and yellow bile. Those are the four bodily fluids, called humors. In antiquity it was believed they influenced a person’s state of mind. If there was an imbalance in the bodily fluids, it could also lead to various illnesses.”

  “You mentioned your nephew who used to get nosebleeds. Does that have something to do with the four bodily fluids?”

  “Yes. He had an excess of blood, sanguis, as the Romans called it.”

  “In other words, he was sanguine?”

  “Yes. Like you.”

  “What do you know about me?”

  “Not much. But a person’s temperament is the first thing that becomes apparent. It’s rare that anybody can hide it for long, even if they try. Someone who is sanguine wouldn’t bother. A sanguine person is extroverted, full of blood and easily moved, cheerful, easygoing, and fun. It’s a compliment to be called sanguine.”

  Knut thought about this as he sat in silence. He liked Gjessing. The old man was a dreamer. You could almost see his thoughts whirling in his head when you looked into his eyes. There was a glint in his eyes, the remnants of a youth that should have faded long ago.

  “In modern times we dismiss the wisdom of the bodily fluids, but many people, also within the field of psychiatry, think that each human being is born with a fundamental temperament, which is constant and independent of more situation-based shifts in mood. That temperament can be changed only by decisive events, illnesses, or injuries. What’s interesting is that temperament is still regarded as something inherited and relatively static; something that is still influenced to a certain degree by fluids in the body. Today we call these fluids hormones. Here’s to progress!”

  The old man picked up his glass of port, which he’d filled as they talked. Knut poured himself a glass, and together they drank a toast.

  “You can borrow the book. Even though you’re a lighthearted kind of person, it would do you good to read about the dark side.”

  Knut looked at the spine of the old book. It was the same color as the trunk of a spruce tree. The gilded letters looked like they were about to sink into the bark and disappear.

  Lighthearted? he thought. If you only knew. He studied the old man sitting across from him. He resembled a squirrel, hunched over his glass of port wine as if it were a pinecone.

  “Skål to melancholy!” said Knut.

  He downed the rest of his wine and then refilled his glass.

  Gjessing set down his glass and lit his pipe. The tobacco had a sweet fragrance. With a tinge of plums, nuts, and old man. The topic of conversation then shifted to deep-sea fishing. It was one of Gjessing’s great passions.

  “Some people think it’s sheer madness to fish at a depth of a thousand feet,” said Gjessing, suddenly transformed. A deep-sea fisherman near the end of his life, but with fire in his voice.

  “But it’s at those depths that something incredible can happen. I once pulled in a ling weighing 110 pounds. Imagine that! That’s more than an average ten-year-old child weighs, even today when all the kids are overweight. It took me five hours to haul in the beast. I was all alone in the boat and enjoyed every second of it. Never any question of giving up. Finally, I got it over the gunwale. You should have seen the eyes on that thing. It was one of those blue lings with bulging eyes. It stared at me as if it had seen the very core of the earth and knew more about the world’s secrets than any man of science. I had to let it go. But you should have seen it! Almost five feet long! There’s nothing to compare with a blue ling from the deep like that.”

  “The Old Man and the Sea,” murmured Knut.

  He hadn’t read the book of that title. The phrase just slipped out of him. He didn’t mean for the old man to hear, and he realized that the remark could be taken as snide. But Gjessing wasn’t offended.

  “Ah, Hemingway. So y
ou’re a literary man?”

  “You know I’m studying law,” replied Knut. “But I like reading other things too,” he added untruthfully.

  “Reading and fishing,” muttered Gjessing ambiguously, wetting his parched lips with more wine.

  “Do you have any family, Mr. Gjessing?” asked Knut. “Brothers? Sisters? Cousins?”

  “I have several cousins. The nephew I mentioned comes to visit now and then. But Else and I never had any children. It took too much time from what we thought was life.”

  Knut poured more port wine into Gjessing’s glass. He emptied the rest of the bottle into his own and took a big swig.

  Suddenly a thought occurred to him. A liberating thought.

  “Why don’t you ever want me to deposit the rent in your bank account?” He took out the six thousand-krone bills from his pants pocket.

  “I don’t trust banks. I only keep enough in my account to pay the bills, and an old man doesn’t have many bills to worry about.”

  He spoke as if that were a sad state of affairs. And maybe it was. Someone who doesn’t pay for things never receives anything either, thought Knut.

  “Is there anything safer than a bank?” he asked innocently.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I trust you. I don’t know why. I just do. I’m one of those old guys who hides my money under the mattress. Don’t know why. The money will probably still be there when I die. But I like the thought of whoever cleans up after me finding the money.”

  Knut leaned forward and placed the rent money on the table in front of Gjessing.

  “Well, here’s a little more you can tuck away.”

  Then he stood up and emptied his glass. The last drop was sweeter than the first. He inhaled the smell of tobacco from Gjessing’s pipe and saw how the smoke was hovering near the ceiling above him. White clouds indoors.