Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

At last, when it actually looked as though Harald Hardråde was gaining ground on the bridge, one of his adversaries, he too invisible, loosed an arrow from his bow. A resounding twang was heard, like a symmetrical echo of the programme’s opening scene. A fateful sound, a sound louder than everything else. There was a shot of the arrow flashing through the air, heading straight for the viewer, so lifelike and deadly, a bloody great arrowhead about to burst right through the screen. In a thousand homes people ducked, threw themselves off their chairs. A moment later, from the floor, they saw the arrow embedded in Harald’s throat and the sword slipping from his hand.

And it was this same pitiless ending, this grisly shot that caused history to take a different turn, so to speak, which also changed the story of Viktor Harlem. It was the shot that woke him, or so he said. He had clutched at his throat, as if to pull out a hurtful arrow, and suddenly he could talk. ‘Well, that was a long trip, I must say,’ he exclaimed. ‘Where am I? Who are all these old folk? Wow, what a great chair, is it mine?’

Jonas read all about it in his cell a few days later. A medical miracle the papers called it. Sadly, though, all was not as it should be. Viktor had woken up, but he could not remember a thing. Where his head might have been designed by the Creator to take a sixty-watt bulb it now seemed to be running on twenty-five watts. He had no idea who he was, and he could remember nothing of his past. He could, however, remember absolutely everything else. He knew that Habakkuk was a prophet, that Ittoqqortoormiit was a region of Greenland and that the birr was the unit of currency in Ethiopia. He knew that Haydn’s mother was Anna Maria Koller and that his wife’s name was Maria Anna Keller. He knew that Galileo died in the year that Newton was born. He knew that B.B. King’s guitar was called Lucille. Everyone was baffled. Not least the doctors. Jonas alone guessed the truth. Viktor had spent a couple of decades watching television, to begin with only NRK and the two Swedish channels, but also the other channels as they came along. For some reason every single bit of what he had seen — snippets of news broadcasts and documentaries, natural history series, soap operas and music programmes — had lodged inside his brain. He remembered nothing from ‘the real world’, but everything from twenty years of television-viewing, from an artificial existence spent with his face turned to the television screen. He also had a rapid, rather staccato way of speaking, as if he were zapping between channels in his head.

But Viktor Harlem was to make the headlines again later. It so happened that his awakening occurred around the same time that the Norwegian version of the popular American quiz programme Jeopardy! was first screened. Viktor, who was now back living with his mother — not that he remembered her, he simply accepted that she was who she said she was — was persuaded to apply for the show and passed the tough and pretty extensive audition with almost daunting bravura. As a contestant he was unbeatable. It was clear that he could answer just about anything, that is to say: answer in the form of a question. He had the most unbelievable fund of knowledge on everything from Ananga Ranga to orang-utans, and could differentiate without blinking between Lee Marvin, Hank Marvin and Hank Williams, not to mention Pasteur and Patorius. After becoming the all-time greatest Jeopardy! champion five times in a row, he was accorded the title of Grand Champion, as if he had suddenly joined the upper echelons of some mysterious brotherhood. Never before had a winner scooped up such breathtakingly large cash prizes or provided such stunning entertainment. Viktor’s popularity soon reached such heights, helped along by all the press coverage, that the TV2 management decided, after consultation with the company which produced Jeopardy! for them, to break with the rules of the game just this once, to bow to public demand — with one eye on the advertising revenue, naturally — and invite him back on to the show. With equally fabulous success for Viktor and equally gratifying viewing figures for the channel. Viktor, who had reverted to his black polo necks and who, with his baby face and longish, wispy hair, looked rather like a seven-year-old Einstein, became something of a national hero. His staccato voice was soon to be heard on every talk show and his zap-zapping comments could be read in every newspaper and magazine. Jonas followed his friend’s Jeopardy! escapades from his cell, shaking his head in disbelief. This Viktor was almost the very opposite of the boy he had been when they were knocking back his illicit absinthe in Seilduksgata in Grünerløkka and calling themselves The Three Heretics. The Viktor whom Jonas saw on television had a head bursting with facts, but his mind was a blank. He could answer any question on the most trivial subject, but he did not know who he was.

Viktor was now proclaimed Norway’s only Double Grand Champion, but the story does not end there. Once there were enough Jeopardy! Grand Champions — twelve in all — a special tournament was held. For weeks beforehand the papers were full of it, with hundreds of column inches devoted to what might have been a showdown between the gods on Olympus. On an Easter weekend in the latter half of the nineties the scene was set for the actual final between the remaining Grand Champions — and a record viewing figure. With Viktor in the last three it seemed certain that everyone was going to get what they were hoping for: a tremendous fight. And a battle it was — with Napoleon playing a starring role.

Although Jonas very rarely watched the television in his cell, for obvious reasons he did follow Viktor’s bizarre career on Jeopardy! with ever-increasing wonder. To Jonas it seemed so ironic: you could be considered an expert on the world without having been consciously present in that world. On the other hand, he had to admit that he enjoyed the programme, and not only because it tended to suggest that the questions were more important than the answers. Like his countrymen Jonas had been fascinated by quiz shows of this sort ever since the first series of Double Your Money was broadcast in the early sixties — that same Double your Money which had played and would play such a curious part in Viktor Harlem’s life.

Before the much publicised Grand Champions Final that Easter, Jonas decided to take a hand in things. Not to spoil anything, but to try, if possible, to shake Viktor awake. Fully awake. Because Jonas knew something known only to a few. Viktor had a complex. Which is to say: a complex of which he had no recall. As a child, in the days when everybody, absolutely everybody, watched the same programmes, especially on Saturday evenings, Viktor had been bullied terribly and had had to watch his father go seriously downhill after the latter, as a contestant on Double Your Money answering questions on the multi-faceted subject of Napoleon, had failed to answer one of the last parts of the 10,000- krone question. The fateful question was: What was the name of the marshal in command of Napoleon I’s Corps at the Battle of Austerlitz? The answer, which his father could not remember due to a mental block as freakish as it was unfair, was of course Jean Baptiste-Jules Bernadotte. In other words, the man later to be known as Karl Johan, the king who lent his name to Oslo’s main thoroughfare.

The memory of this gave Jonas an idea. He called the producer of Jeopardy! , a former colleague at NRK who now worked for the company responsible for the quiz show. Jonas knew that this man could pull a few strings with the compilers of the questions for the Jeopardy! Grand Champions Final with no one being any the wiser. Despite the impropriety of the request, Jonas’s former colleague had immediately agreed to help. ‘Remember, we’re dealing with a sick man here,’ Jonas stressed. ‘We have to try everything.’