Brock Clarke - The Happiest People in the World

But she didn’t know yet about their house: someone had set fire to it six hours earlier. He told her about it.

“Gone?” she said.

“I’m sorry, Ilsa,” he said.

“Gone,” she repeated. Her eyes were far away: he could see her seeing their house, their marriage. Gone, gone. Skagen would be gone for her, too. Jens would always want to go back to Skagen, but the agents told him he wouldn’t be able to, because of their plan for him. Ilsa would be able to go back there if she wanted. But she wouldn’t want to. She was from Aarhus. That was her home. For her, Skagen would always be the small town with the burned-down house and the ruined marriage. And that, to Jens, felt like the worst thing that had ever happened to him.

“Where will you go?” she asked him.

He cocked his head toward the car idling in the street behind him. “They’re figuring that out right now,” he said. And then he told her the plan. The plan was for the agents to announce that Jens had been killed in the fire. The agents had recommended this. They’d told Jens that whoever had set the fire wouldn’t stop trying to kill him until he was dead. So they were, with his permission, going to declare him dead. “It’s the best way,” Jens told Ilsa, repeating what the agents had told him. He looked to see whether Ilsa understood all of this. She looked back at him with big, solemn eyes.

“What do I have to do?” she asked.

“You have to act like I’m dead,” he said.

She nodded. “I can do that,” she said.

After that, neither Jens nor Ilsa seemed to know what to say. Jens fought off the urge to tell her again that everything would be just fine, even though he really did believe that was true. He also fought off the urge to tell her he was scared, although that was true, too. Because what do you say when a marriage ends like this? Jens pictured a cartoon in which a man and a woman, the woman standing in front of a burning house and the man in front of an open grave, handed oversize wedding rings back to each other, the woman saying, “Well, that was a mistake.”

And then Jens turned, walked to the agents’ car, got into the backseat, and closed the door. The car drove off. There were two agents in the front seat; Jens was by himself in the back. After a moment he said, “That was horrible. But I do think I got through it fairly well.” But the agents didn’t respond. Possibly they didn’t hear Jens, because he was crying so hard as he spoke, or because they were busy figuring out where they were going to take him next, where he was going to run.

But where?” Tarik asked Søren. It was eight o’clock, the morning after the fires. They had just read about the cartoonist in the newspaper. Not the newspaper whose offices Tarik had burned down, of course; a different newspaper, a daily out of Aalborg. Murderers, the Aalborg newspaper had said. Religious extremists. Terrorists. “Run,” Søren said. Neither of them thought of themselves as terrorists or religious extremists. And strictly speaking, it was Søren, not Tarik, who was the murderer. Because Søren was the one who’d burned down the cartoonist’s house. “Should we run?” Søren had said.

“But where?” Tarik wanted to know. They were out in Grenen, reading the paper, sitting next to the dunes that were next to the parking lot. Søren and Tarik were eighteen years old. Their jobs were to answer any questions people might have about the machines that dispensed the parking passes you were to put on your dashboard before you went out to the point to watch the waves. But nobody ever had any questions, not even the really old people who didn’t know how anything worked. The machines were pretty much self-explanatory. It was a crummy job, no less crummy for being so easy. Basically the two of them just slouched around the parking lot all day like bored teenagers everywhere. Sometimes, when the parking lot was especially empty, they got on their cykler and played følg leder . Sometimes they read the newspapers people left behind on benches. That was where they’d seen Jens Baedrup’s cartoon: in someone’s abandoned copy of the Skagen Optimist . Yet another cartoon featuring Muhammad with a bomb in his turban! It was unbelievable, they agreed. They couldn’t believe it. They felt insulted by the absolute stupidity of this guy. The terrible, lame newspaper that’d printed the cartoons, too. Did they really think they were saying something new and profound about the other cartoons, etc.? Or were they just hateful people stirring up more trouble? Either way, they were stupid. Please stop drawing and printing these stupid cartoons, Søren and Tarik wanted to say, or would have, if these cartoonists and newspapers weren’t too stupid to listen, and if Søren and Tarik weren’t too angry. Angry, it was clear exactly what they were going to do, what other people did in other similar situations: they would burn down the newspaper building, the cartoonist’s house. But they’d never meant to kill anyone. That was clear to them, even though their anger hadn’t made it clear to them that when burning down occupied buildings, killing someone was always a possibility. But the newspaper out of Aalborg had made this obvious enough. Now, they were trying to figure out what to do about it.

“Turkey?” Søren said. He and Tarik had been born in Denmark, but all four of their parents had been born in Turkey. Søren and Tarik knew nothing about the place. They’d have to ask their parents for help. Their parents would have to ask them why in the world they wanted to go to Turkey. Tarik would have to tell his parents he burned down the newspaper building. That was bad enough. But Søren would have to tell his father (his mother had died a few years earlier), Dad, I killed that cartoonist. “I can’t do it,” he thought and also said.

“We’re not going anywhere,” Tarik agreed. He crumpled up the newspaper, was about to throw it into the dune, then changed his mind and tossed it into the nearby trash can. Soon the cars began to pull into the parking lot. Tarik stood up to take his helpful position near the parking-ticket dispensing machine. But Søren sat on the ground, eye level with some dune grass.

“I killed that man,” Søren said.

“Stand up,” Tarik said. Søren did that. “And keep it to yourself.” And for four years that was what he managed to do.

Two years later, as Jens Baedrup was in one city (it was Berlin) to which he’d already run preparing to run to somewhere else, Jens asked the agent guarding him where she would run if she were him. The agent was standing at the window, looking at the street, her right hand on her holstered gun, her left hand holding the radio to her ear. With her free ear she must have been listening for the sound of Jens’s suitcase shutting and latching, and when she didn’t hear it, she turned around and said, “ Hurry. ” Long before this, Jens had been handed off by the Danish Security and Intelligence Service to a series of agents who spoke to Jens and each other in an accent that could have meant they were Americans or could have meant that they’d learned to speak English from watching American TV. As for Jens, his English was both unaccented and perfect, as it was, of course, required to be by the Danish educational system.

He shut his suitcase and asked her, “Where are we going now?”

The agent looked back out the window and sighed in a way that seemed intended to let Jens know how peeved she was that he and his little cartoon had put her into a position where she was forced to actually do her incredibly boring and dangerous job. “You know about as much as I do,” she said. This, of course, was completely untrue. As with everyone who’d kept him safe, she knew exactly why he had to leave and where he was going next. As with every one of his safe-keepers, she never told him what she knew, including why he had to keep running if everyone thought that he was already dead. (“Credible threat,” was all she would say when he asked. “There’s a credible threat.”) As with every one of his safe-keepers, this made Jens totally dependent on her, and it also made him fall in love with her a little bit, and it also made him want to go somewhere remote where he would never see her again.