Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

A breath of wind causes the rugs to flap into the room, sunlight floods in, a puff of warm air strikes my face.

‘The flies!’ shrieks Egger. ‘They’re heading for the light! Catch the flies!’

The men stare at him in puzzlement. Look up towards where the swarm has already magically disappeared; only a few flies are left now around the slowly rotating ceiling fan.

One of the men opens fire on them.

‘No!’ Egger shouts. He’s almost crying.

No one stops me when I get up, walk over to the window and lift aside one of the rugs.

I’m looking out on a hillside. There are roofs below me, and the settlement continues all the way down to a point where it suddenly stops, and desert takes over. And beyond that: just sand, and a sun that is either risen and on its way up through the sky, or setting and on its way down, it’s hard to tell when you don’t know which direction you’re looking in. It’s very beautiful. And speaking of the sky, I think of the flies which are now, for the first time in their short lives — the lifespan of the average fly is twenty-eight days — free and on their way up into the heavens, taking with them what they’ve consumed of Bernard Johansson’s head. I close my eyes and feel a remarkable freedom, in spite of the men with the guns behind me. I don’t know what it is, only that I’ve unburdened myself of something, and now feel myself as light as a... well, as a fly.

If they don’t intend to lock me up, are they going to shoot me now? Maybe, and if so then it’s for something I’ve forgotten, something I found it necessary to shred; that at least is the only image that emerges when I join up the dots linking the few clues I find here in this room. And if I were to summarise my allotted span before they shoot, what could I say? That I have used my life, my twenty-eight days, to develop HADES1, a medicine that might be the start of something that will reduce the suffering of humanity. So no, it cannot have been a completely wasted life. That’s fine. There’s nothing I miss.

But still I feel a curious emptiness somewhere inside me. As though an organ has been surgically removed, I can’t find any other way to express it. And there, in that emptiness, I feel that yes, there really is something I miss.

I miss having known love. Having had a woman in my life.

‘Ready,’ i said.

‘Get set,’ said Peter.

‘Go!’ we shouted in unison and started running.

The deal was that the last to cross the imaginary finishing line between Zurriola’s beach and the lifeguard’s chair two hundred metres away had to buy beers for us both. But it was also training and a rehearsal for our participation in the bull run at Pamplona in two days’ time.

For the first few metres I didn’t give my all. Not just because I could afford not to but because I was pretty sure I would win and at the same time didn’t want to rub Peter’s nose in it in a way that would put him in a bad mood. Peter Coates’s genetic heritage hadn’t given him much practice in losing. He came from a line of scientists, models and businessmen, all of them successful and affluent and — those I had met at least — with unusually white teeth. But they weren’t a notably athletic family. I kept a couple of metres behind Peter and observed his energetic but not especially effective or elegant running style. He had muscles, powerful thighs and a broad back, but although he was by no means overweight there was something heavy about him, as though he moved through a heavier gravitational field.

I had to position myself directly behind him when the course narrowed between two sunloungers and some bathers making their way back up from the cooling waters of the Biscay, and the sand kicked up by Peter’s bare feet sprayed across my stomach. We got a few choice Spanish oaths tossed after us but neither one of us slowed down. I pulled out to the right of Peter, closer to the water’s edge, where the sand was firmer and nice and cool underfoot. When we planned our trip Peter had told me that not only did San Sebastián have some of Europe’s finest restaurants but was also known to be relatively cool when the heat of the Spanish summer was at its most ferocious. That San Sebastián was the place where the more sophisticated and less sun-worshipping class of tourists took their vacation. And fortunately the cloud cover and the steady breeze we’d experienced since our arrival there the day before had been a welcome relief from the stifling heat of Paris and on the train journey.

I went up a gear and ran alongside Peter and could see the look of triumph already on his flushed face with the finishing line less than fifty metres away, and how it gave way to a look of desperation when he saw me next to him. I still had a choice, I could still let him win. A defeat would cost him more than victory would reward me, so it wasn’t a case of what Peter had told me was called a zero-sum game in which the pluses and minuses all cancel each other out in the great reckoning. But the question was really whether it would hurt him more to realise I had let him win. Peter’s laboured panting, and the fact that he was giving it absolutely everything, didn’t they oblige me to show him respect by also giving my all? And wasn’t there a tiny little part of me that really did want to rub his nose in it, for being so superior to me in every other way? Thirty metres to go. Choices. They feel so free; but are they really? Wasn’t what I was about to do already written in the stars?

I sprinted and in a couple of seconds was past him. I could see him trying to respond but he didn’t have enough left; his running got more and more ragged and he lost what little rhythm he had had to begin with. I simply maintained a steady speed so as not to beat him by too much, but still he fell further behind. Five or six more paces and we’d be over the finishing line. I felt something hit my leg, lost my balance and tumbled forward. I just about had time to break my fall and to see Peter gliding past me.

He walked back towards me, hands held above his head, his white teeth gleaming, and I sat up, still spitting sand.

‘Cheat!’ I coughed as I tried to summon up more saliva.

Peter laughed loudly. ‘Cheat?’

I spat and I spat. ‘Tackling from behind, that was an obvious trip.’

‘So what? Was there anything in the rules against that?’

‘Come on, that’s a given.’

‘Nothing is a given, Martin. Rules are constructions. Constructions have to be constructed. Before that happens the ability to be—’ he held up his closed fist and raised a finger to accentuate each point — ‘problem-solving, to take rapid decisions, to see past rigid modes of thought, to ignore counterproductive moral conceptions and—’ he smiled as he held out a hand to help me up — ‘as well as to tackle from behind are as admirable as the ability to move the legs rapidly.’

I took his hand and pulled myself to my feet. Brushed the sand off my body. ‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to comfort myself that in one of your parallel universes right at this very moment I’m the one who’s tackled you from behind, I’m the one who’s giving you the lecture, and you’re the one who has to go and buy the beers.’

Peter laughed and put his arm around my shoulder. ‘I buy, you fetch, OK?’

‘Parallel universes do exist,’ Peter said again as he took a swig from the bottle and sort of wriggled himself and his towel deeper into the sand.

‘OK,’ I said, carrying out the difficult art of drinking lying down, and peered up into the grey sky above us. ‘I understand that I don’t understand your quantum physics and your theory of relativity, and that I’m sure what you say is right about there being enough dark matter to make a parallel universe, but that there’s an infinite number of them, well, I have trouble with that.’