Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

‘The sewage pipe goes up to the house in a straight line — all you have to do is stick the bazooka inside it and pull the trigger. I went and had a look around and I found the outlet for the pipe on the slope. The terrain is uneven and there’s a bit of climbing, but we can get there and away again without being seen.’

‘Perfect!’ says Brad with a laugh. ‘So what do you think?’

‘About what?’

‘About doing it.’

I shrug. Adams was insistent that I shouldn’t lead Brad on or try to manipulate him. I was to make sure both options were open, so that his choice really was free. Or as Adams put it: as free as we are to choose, being the people we are at any particular given moment in our lives. The point is — said Adams — the choice is Brad’s: he can be his own punishment, or his own redemption.

‘You’re the one who decides,’ I say.

‘We know that, but maybe you’ve heard it said that the sign of a good leader is that they ask for advice. Of course, it’s then up to them whether or not to take the advice.’

‘I can’t offer you any advice when Chaos doesn’t stand to lose or gain anything by this. You’ve got to follow your own heart and your own head, Brad.’

He seems irritated. ‘OK then. I’ve already decided to do it, I just wanted to hear your opinion.’

There’s a loud noise from outside and for a moment there’s silence in the room; even the guy with his ‘Champions’ song keeps his mouth shut for a few seconds. Firelight flares outside the windows and I hear the cheers of Eric and the twins.

‘I thought at dawn,’ says Brad. ‘What do you say?’

‘Dawn sounds good.’

‘But everyone knows that attacks always come around daybreak. Won’t they be especially on the alert, don’t you think?’

‘Could be.’

‘But you still think dawn is best?’

‘Dawn is always best.’

Brad nods. Gives me a long scrutiny before he gets up and shouts: ‘Party’s over, Chaos! Drink up! We ride an hour before dawn!’

Cheers from the stoned gang members. The cheers turn into a foot-stomping chant of: ‘Brad! Brad!’

He smiles broadly and holds his arms out wide in a gesture that both asks them to stop and at the same time accepts their tribute. He looks happy. Really happy. It was the last time I would ever see him look that way.

I wake up. Hear the steady, even breathing from Heidi and Sam. It’s still dark in the cabin, but I can see a strip of grey along the edge of the curtain. It’s no surprise to me that with Colin Lowe’s tickets we’ve got a large cabin with three rooms on the upper deck. Heidi wept with joy. I look at the clock. Soon the sun will start its journey over the horizon.

Heidi snuggles up to me.

‘What’s the matter?’ she whispers sleepily.

‘Just something I dreamed.’

‘What was that?’

‘I don’t really remember,’ I lie.

I dreamed I was standing next to Brad and Yvonne. Brad was laughing and Yvonne looked serious as we stood and watched the burning villa. Brad laughed even louder when he heard the screaming and three people in flames came running through the garden and out towards us, down the slope.

‘Burn in hell, Adams!’ Brad cheered.

I turned and asked him if he couldn’t see who it was who was burning, but Brad could neither see nor hear me. The flaming figures came closer, the tallest one holding two smaller ones close, and they fell to their knees in front of us.

‘Brad,’ said the tallest one. ‘Burn with us. Burn with us.’

And I saw Brad’s eyes open wide. His laughter stopped, his mouth fell open.

He turned. Now he could see me.

‘You,’ he said. ‘You did this.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘All I did was give you a choice. And you chose to start a fire.’

Brad ran forward. He fell to his knees and put his arms around the three of them as though trying to join them in the flames. But it was too late. Blackened and charred they crumbled in his arms. Brad stared at the ash on the ground. Buried his hands in it and screamed as though his very soul was in pain as the wind blew the ash away.

‘But can you tell whether it was a good dream?’ asks Heidi.

I think about it.

‘No,’ I say, and now I’m telling the truth. ‘I can’t. Come here...’

We’re out walking on the deck. I’m carrying Sam, who’s still sleeping. Everything is grey, it’s all either sea or sky, there is no land, no horizon. Single-celled life, apparently that’s how it all began. Then the sun rises up over the rim. As though by magic things acquire form and colour, and a new universe takes shape in front of our eyes.

‘Our first sunrise,’ I whisper.

Heidi repeats it: ‘Our first sunrise.’

A fly lands on the back of my hand. I stare at it. The average lifespan of a fly is twenty-eight days. Does it know that? Does it perhaps wish that life could be longer? If it were offered a longer life in return for wiping out all memory of its loved ones, of all it has achieved, of its best days and moments, what would it choose?

I don’t have time to worry about that right now. I move my hand and the fly takes off.

I need to forget, and I need to do it quickly.

I sit at the desk in front of the shredder. I close my eyes a moment and listen to the humming sound. It could be the fan in the ceiling. It might be coming from the suitcase. Or it could be the people outside on the streets. Then again it could be spy-drones. People say the military still have them.

Anyway, they’ve been on my trail for a long time, and I know that this time I’m not going to manage to get away. It stops here, in a stinking, baking hot apartment in El Aaiún. In the ceiling, between the bullet-holes and the shrapnel damage, a fan slowly rotates. It moves that scorching hot desert air around a bit after the sirocco has brushed aside the heavy Moroccan Berber rugs hanging in front of the windows and the balcony.

In a corner of the apartment, in front of the refrigerator, is a brown leather suitcase. It’s a bomb. When it’s opened, everything will be blown to bits, everything we know and aren’t supposed to know will be gone. But before that can happen, whatever is inside it must be devoured, each brain cell must be consumed, must grow wings. Only then will it be time for the great flight. And before that I must forget everything I know.

But first I have to remember, call up the memories that need to be removed.

The white face on the screen of the shredder looks like a mask in a Greek tragedy. I try not to blink as I study my own reflection and manoeuvre my head so that my pupils are in line with the holes in the mask. Every trace that either directly or indirectly can lead them to the formula must be obliterated. I try to concentrate, because I know that only what I can remember now will be wiped out. Everything else they will be able to reconstruct from my brain, even when I’m dead. And I also know that the most efficient and complete deletion comes when the shredder is fed with memory pictures in chronological order, because then the associative memories are destroyed too. ‘Think of it as like gutting a fish,’ the sergeant who was instructing our research team said. ‘Only the fish is you .‘

OK. First the idea.

It came to me in the middle of the night. I’d woken up beside my wife Klara needing to pee. I got up as quietly as I could so as not to wake her and made my way to the bathroom. We were living in Rainerstrasse, in that part of the city that still has electricity and running water. It was raining outside. I know that because I would have remembered if it hadn’t been raining. Half awake, and about to urinate, I noticed I had the beginnings of an erection. I tried to remember what I’d been dreaming but there was nothing there that might have caused sexual arousal. My researcher’s brain simply registered that my body had produced nitric oxide and norepinephrine. As I stood there my thoughts wandered on, created a new dream. I was dead, and my condition was what they referred to during the public hangings that took place directly after the Last War as angel-lust. As a medical student I learned that there was a simple physiological, not chemical, explanation for angel-lust, the fact that some of those on the gallows had erections visible through their trousers: the rope exerted an increased pressure on the cerebellum, and it was this that caused the priapism. Whoever invented the name angel-lust had probably been playing with the idea that there might be pleasure and joy, perhaps even some kind of liberation in death. But only playing. Death is, after all, the ultimate seriousness. The enemy who is always on our trail, whom we spend our lives fleeing from but who will, sooner or later, find us. It’s just a question of when.