Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

And then there was the juggling, an experience which would leave its mark on Jonas for the rest of his life. This particular show took place during the careful preparations for the indisputable high point of those weeks: the expedition to the Vegans’ hide-out in Lillomarka. Jonas had happened to ask why they had to plan everything in such detail, do so many things at the same time; work out positions on the map, catch butterflies, get hold of glass prisms, choose things to take with them. And it was then that Bo — they were in the living room at the time — picked up three, then four, then five oranges from a dish and started to juggle with them. Jonas construed this as a practical lesson of sorts: if they were to uncover the hidden country they would need to combine things, keep several balls in the air at one time. He did not realise that what he was witnessing was a rare feat. Anyone can juggle with three balls; juggling with four is far more difficult and takes dedicated practice; juggling with five is a real tour de force, of which only very few are capable. It was all Jonas could do simply to follow the golden pattern that took shape before his eyes: five oranges passing so quickly through Bo’s hands and so high up in the air that the effect was quite mesmerising. ‘This is what we’re going to try to do,’ Bo cried, as if he had to raise his voice in order to break through his own wall of concentration. As far as Jonas was concerned this was pure alchemy: Bo had transformed something perfectly ordinary into a ring of gold.

‘Here, now you try,’ said Bo. He handed Jonas three oranges and proceeded to peel one of the others.

Jonas had a go, tossed the oranges into the air one after another. Made a complete botch of it, of course. ‘Try again,’ Bo said. ‘And look up this time. Focus on a point just under the top of the circle.’ Bo taught Jonas the basic techniques while sitting on the sofa, popping wedges of orange into his mouth and laughing at Jonas’s hapless efforts, with oranges thudding, and eventually splattering, onto the floor. ‘Don’t walk forward!’ Bo yelled, doubled up with laughter.

‘What’s the record?’ Jonas asked.

Bo handed him the rest of the orange wedges as a consolation prize and took out his yellow notebook. ‘Eleven balls,’ he said. ‘Did you know that scientists today believe that the world has at least eleven dimensions?’ He could tell from Jonas’s face that he would have to explain again what dimension meant, even though he had already done so when talking about the Vegans’ hide-out.

‘I bet there are even more,’ Jonas said.

‘Just as one day somebody will manage to juggle with more than eleven balls,’ Bo said, and scribbled down something with the stub of pencil that was always tucked behind his ear.

That summer, Jonas actually did learn to juggle first with three oranges, then with four. He never felt quite the same about this golden fruit again; from then on he could never eat an orange without thinking of Bo Wang Lee. And for the rest of his life he was always able to impress anyone with his little party trick. Even in the midst of a serious discussion he was quite liable to suddenly toss four oranges into the air and thus manage to say something which he could not put into words. The following year, when Jonas met the triplets, the first thing he thought of was a juggling act, felt he was faced with the possibility of an extraordinary experience. All he had to do was to keep three schoolboy crushes in the air at one time.

But the best was yet to come. The day before the expedition into the forest — Jonas had just wrapped the four crystals carefully in four checkered handkerchiefs — they were in the room where Bo slept. Each sat with a mini bottle of Cola, sipping through a paper straw, as if to gather sustenance, while observing the way the four butterflies in the jars on Bo’s bedside table mimicked their actions, unrolling their probosces like straws and sipping from the orangeade tops filled with sugared water. In one of the open suitcases in the bare, cabin-like room, Jonas spied a dubious-looking shoebox lying next to a Viewmaster containing pictures from Yellowstone National Park. He reached out for it, but Bo stopped him, as if it were taboo. Or private — because Bo opened the box himself, gently lifted out one object after another. ‘It’s just some things I’ve collected,’ he said. ‘Things to speed up the thought processes.’

Bo’s shoebox reminded Jonas of Aunt Laura’s story about the Renaissance princes and the curiosities they kept in secret rooms at the heart of their palaces. Bo laid the objects out on the bed. An old pocket watch which no longer worked, but had a nice pattern engraved on the lid; a pencil sharpener shaped like a globe; a chunk of rock with a trilobite embedded in it; a bunch of funny-looking keys; an old-fashioned purse containing three silver dollars — one of them with a bullet hole in it, made by Wild Bill Hickock. Jonas understood that he ought to take note of these things, since they probably said a lot about who Bo Wang Lee was.

As if to encourage Jonas, to give him heart before setting out on their hair-raising expedition in search of the Vegans, Bo began to juggle with first three, then four, and finally all of these objects. The spinning oranges had been a wonderful sight, but this was more wonderful. Much more. ‘This is the sort of thing we’re going to try to do,’ he told Jonas again, speaking as if through a circular portal. Although these things did not actually form a circle, like the sort you see in drawings of jugglers; they criss-crossed in mid-air in what was for Jonas the most mind-boggling fashion, tracing a loop rather like a figure-of-eight on its side. And Jonas stared and stared; he saw how the purse, a trilobite, a pocket-watch, a bundle of keys and a globe of the world seemed to hover in mid-air while at the same time forming a unified whole, what he would later describe as a synthesis. It was a concrete manifestation of something he had experienced before, many times, when thinking about several things at once. And not only several things, but several different things. And he was delighted to see that the result, this spellbinding infinity symbol which Bo was weaving with his hands, was something quite other than the sum of its individual parts; that it was a whole new, little world, one which belonged to another sphere or perhaps what Bo called another dimension. Or even Vega, he thought. Why not?

Bo juggled the objects so fast that soon they were nothing but a blur. It reminded him of that chain of Bo’s, the one with the words ‘I love you’ broken up into two incomprehensible sets of symbols on either side of a metal disc. Jonas perceived a great deal at that moment, as he watched a friend — a boy he had become closer to than anyone else in only three weeks — who juggled as brilliantly as any wizard. Jonas sensed that he too might be like that, that he could consist of two — or more — elements, completely dissimilar, incomprehensible elements, which could, somehow or other, be set in motion in such a way that they spun together to form a whole. He also had the feeling that with his juggling act Bo was trying to tell him something else; that with this strange pattern in the air he might even be saying: ‘I love you.’

‘That … is absolutely phenomenal,’ Jonas stammered. He motioned to Bo to keep going while he went to fetch a camera from the living room. Jonas wanted with all his heart to capture this sight, since it was for him as sensational and indeed as unbelievable as a UFO. ‘Don’t stop,’ he said, backing cautiously towards the door. But at these words Bo lost his concentration and everything tumbled to the floor or, fortunately, onto a soft carpet. ‘Shit!’ Bo said nonetheless. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’