Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

What did she say?

Oh hell, no.

Out of nowhere the snakes in my stomach entwined themselves again, and since there was nothing left below they were furious and squeezed so hard that I groaned. OOOOOHH I went. OOOHHHH. I wrapped my arms around the toilet bowl and hung my head over the hole, but nothing came, I was empty.

CHRIST ALMIGHTY! I shouted. STOP THIS! NOW!

Then came a mouthful of unbelievably thick bile, I spat it out and reckoned that was it, but it wasn’t, my stomach continued to churn, and I tried to alleviate it by hawking, from the bottom of my throat, for if only a little came up surely the vomiting would stop.

OOOHH. OOOHH. OOOHH.

Some phlegm came up.

There. That’s the way.

Finished now?

Yes.

Ah.

Oh.

I grabbed the edge of the sink with one hand and pulled myself up. Rinsed my face with cold water and staggered into the sitting room, not too difficult, fine, lay back down on the sofa, thought I should find out what the time was but didn’t have the energy, all that counted now was to wait for my body to recover and then the day could begin. After all, I was going to write another short story.

I had experienced blackouts like this, after which I remembered only fragments of what I had done, ever since I first started drinking. That was the summer I finished the ninth class, at the Norway Cup, when I just laughed and laughed, a momentous experience; being drunk took me to places where I was free and did what I wanted while it raised me aloft and rendered everything around me wonderful. Only recalling bits and pieces afterwards, isolated scenes brightly illuminated against a wall of darkness from which I emerged and disappeared back into, was the norm. And so it went on. The following spring I went to the carnival with Jan Vidar, mum had made me up as Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, the town was heaving with people wearing curly black wigs, hot pants and sequins, everywhere there was the throb of samba drums, but the air was cold, people were stiff, there was a huge amount of embarrassment to be overcome all the time, and this was visible in the processions, people were squirming rather than dancing, they wanted to feel emancipated, that was what this was about, they were not, they wanted to be, this was the 1980s, this was the new liberated and forward-looking era in which everything Norwegian was pathetic and everything Mediterranean was alive and free, when the sole TV channel which had informed the Norwegian population for twenty years about what one small circle of educated people in Oslo considered important for them to know was suddenly joined by new very different TV channels which took a lighter approach, they wanted to entertain, and they wanted to sell, and from then on these two entities fused: entertainment and sales became two sides of the same coin and subsumed everything else, which also became entertainment and sales, from music to politics, literature, news, health, in fact everything. The carnival marked this transition, a nation moving away from the seriousness of the 1970s to the levity of the 1990s, and this transition was visible in the awkward movements, in the nervous eyes and the wild triumphant looks of those who had overcome this awkwardness and nervousness and were now wiggling their lean bottoms on the backs of the lorries that crawled through Kristiansand’s streets on this cold spring morning with a light drizzle in the air. That was how it was in Kristiansand and that was how it was in all the other towns in Norway of any size and any self-respect. Carnival was the rage and would become a tradition, they said, every year these stiff white men and women would affirm their emancipation to the best of their ability on lorries, decked out as Mediterraneans, dancing and laughing to the drums that former school brass band musicians played with such a seductive hypnotic beat.

Even two sixteen-year-olds like Jan Vidar and me understood that this was sad. Of course there was nothing we wanted more than a Mediterranean-style explosion in our day-to-day reality, for there was nothing we yearned for more than inviting breasts and bums, music and loads of fun, and if there was anything we wanted to be it was dark-skinned confident men who took these women at will. We were against meanness and all for generosity, we were against constraints and for openness and freedom. Nevertheless we saw these processions and were overcome by sadness on behalf of our town and country because there was an unbelievable lack of pride about all this, indeed it was as if the whole town was making a fool of itself, without realising. But we did realise and we were sad as we strolled around, each with half a bottle of spirits in an inside pocket, becoming more and more drunk and cursing our town and the idiotic people in it while always keeping an eye open for faces we knew and could perhaps get together with. That is, girls’ faces, or at a pinch boys’ faces we knew who were with girls’ faces we didn’t know. Our project was doomed, we were never going to meet girls this way, but we didn’t give up as long as there was a glimmer of hope, we strolled on, getting drunker and drunker, more and more depressed. And then, at some point, I disappeared from myself. Not from Jan Vidar, he could see me of course, and when he said something to me he received an answer so he imagined that everything was as it should be, but it wasn’t, I had disappeared, I was empty, I was in the void of my soul, there was no other way for me to describe it.

Who are you when you don’t know you exist? Who were you when you didn’t remember that you existed? When I woke up in the bedsit in Elvegaten the following day and knew nothing about anything it felt as if I had been let loose in the town. I could have done anything because when I was as drunk as I was there were no longer any limits in me, I did everything that entered my head, and indeed what would not enter a person’s head?

I rang Jan Vidar. He was in bed asleep, but his father summoned him to the phone.

‘What happened?’ I said.

‘We-ell,’ he said, keeping me on tenterhooks. ‘Strictly speaking nothing happened. That’s what was such crap.’

‘I don’t remember any of the last bit,’ I said. ‘Somewhere on the way to Silokaia, that’s the last thing I remember.’

‘Don’t you? Nothing?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t you remember standing on the back of a lorry and mooning at everyone?’

‘Did I do that?’

He laughed.

‘No, of course not. No, relax, man. Nothing happened. Or rather, yes, something did happen when we were walking home. You bent all the wing mirrors along one street. Someone shouted, “Hey!” at us and so we ran for it. I didn’t notice any difference in you. Were you that drunk?’

‘Yes, it was the spirits.’

‘I fall asleep when I get that drunk. Jesus, though, what a crap evening. You won’t get me to go to carnival again, that’s for sure.’

‘Do you know what I think?’

‘What?’

‘When they have the carnival next year we’ll be there again. We can’t afford not to be. Not much happens in this shite town after all.’

‘True.’

We rang off and I went to wash the Aladdin Sane lightning off my face.

The next time it happened was on Midsummer Night, also with Jan Vidar. We had dragged ourselves, each carrying a bag of beers, down to a place on the coast, to some sea-smoothed rocks below the forest in Hånes, where we wandered around drinking and freezing in the pouring summer rain, surrounded by Øyvind’s many pals and a few people we knew from Hamresanden. Øyvind had chosen this evening of all evenings to finish with his girlfriend, Lene, so she sat crying on a rock, away from the others. I went over to console her, sat beside her and stroked her back while telling her there were other boys, she would get over it, she was so young and beautiful, and she looked at me with gratitude in her eyes and sniffled, I thought it was a shame we were outdoors and not somewhere indoors, where there were beds, and that it was raining now we were outdoors. Suddenly she looked at her jacket and screamed, the shoulder was covered in blood and, as it turned out, her back too. It came from me, I’d cut my hand without noticing and it was bleeding profusely. You prat, she said and stood up. This jacket’s brand new. Do you know how much it cost? Sorry, I said, it wasn’t intentional, I just wanted to cheer you up a bit. Go to hell, she said and headed towards the others, where in the course of the evening she found herself back in favour with Øyvind, while I sat drinking alone staring across the grey surface of the water which the falling rain continued to dot with small evocative rings until Jan Vidar came over and sat down next to me and we could pursue the years-long conversation we had about which girls were pretty or not and who we most fancied sleeping with, all as we slowly but surely got drunker until in the end everything disintegrated and I drifted into a kind of ghost world.