Brock Clarke - The Happiest People in the World

And that’s when Henry knew that the time had come to tell the truth. Henry knew this because he couldn’t think of anything else to tell.

“I was going to tell you,” he said to Ellen, but she was already gesturing to Dr. Vernon, who had just walked up with two empty glasses. Ellen took them and said, “But Barry here had his own nutty idea.”

“Not nutty,” Dr. Vernon said. His eyes were red; he smelled somehow both earthy and clean, as though he had just tilled the patch of dirt where toothpaste grows. He took the two full beers back from Ellen and drank the head off one of them and then the other. “I was just saying that you’d mentioned a Danish cartoonist at the baseball game. And then later on I was talking to some of the kids, and they said they’d heard you were talking to a guy in your office, and that he spoke Danish. Or said he was from Denmark. Anyway, I figured that’s who the guy was.”

Everyone looked at Henry, and he frowned, not because he didn’t understand Dr. Vernon’s nutty idea, but because he suddenly had his own. Am I really going to do this? he thought, and then, before he could ask himself that question again, he did it.

“That’s right,” Henry said. “The man told me he was Jens Baedrup, the controversial Danish cartoonist.”

“Oooh,” someone said softly. It was the sound you make when someone hits you in the stomach: more air than word. It had come from the part of the room where Matty was sitting with Lawrence. Lawrence had a carefully trimmed blond beard, which he would stroke in times of contemplation. He was stroking it right now. Just stroking that beard, and stroking it, and staring at Henry, as though assessing his worth. Lawrence had always seemed to distrust Henry; Henry knew this from students who said that Lawrence sometimes referred to him as “the Swede, ” with the italics. But then again, Henry was marrying Lawrence’s brother’s ex-wife. Of course he would treat him that way. There was a good reason for everything. Meanwhile, Matty was looking completely baffled. There was a good reason for that, too. Perhaps Matty had made that noise, and perhaps the noise was not “Oooh” but “Who?” That question made more sense. In any case, Henry repeated the name, “Jens Baedrup,” and when he said it, he could feel a ridiculous, optimistic smile commandeering his face. Henry recognized it by feel. The smile was his. Or had been when he was still Jens Baedrup.

Larsen, that’s a Danish name,” Ellen repeated. She and Henry were sitting in their room above the Lumber Lodge. It was just after one in the morning. Ellen had finally kicked the drunk stragglers out of the bar and closed up without mopping the floor, without even putting the chairs up. Henry had just told Ellen the story of the stranger visiting him in his office.

“How did he say it?” she asked. Ellen was now holding her phone, which was also something of a computer, and with her left hand she was doing gymnastic things to the face of the phone.

“How did he say what?”

“Jens,” she said, pronouncing it improperly. It is Yents, not Jenz, Henry thought but did not say. “How did he say, ‘Larsen, that’s a Danish name’?”

“With an emphasis on the word ‘Danish.’ ”

“What kind of emphasis?”

Henry pretended to consider this for a moment. “Unhappy,” he said.

Ellen nodded again. “But you’re from Sweden,” she said. “Larsen is a Swedish name.”

“That’s true,” Henry said. “But Larsen can also be a Danish name. You could hear the name Larsen and you wouldn’t be wrong to think that it was a Swedish or a Danish name.”

“And he spoke to you in Danish first and then in English,” Ellen said, thinking about it. “You know how to speak Danish?” It was a very good question. Henry couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it himself.

“Danish isn’t so different from Swedish,” Henry said. “If you speak one, you can generally at least understand the other.”

“But why is he here in the first place? Did he really hear that in Broomeville there was a guy with a Danish last name and thought, I should go there and talk to him?”

It was another excellent question. Henry didn’t answer it. His thoughts drifted toward other excellent questions that he had not anticipated, other excellent questions people might yet ask and he might not be able to answer. This was a serious violation of his method. His method demanded that, when in the company of someone else, his thoughts remain on that person and only on that person. Because when your thoughts were somewhere else, then so were your eyes, and eyes could be read. Eyes will be read. Henry’s thoughts and eyes returned to Ellen, who was looking at him, reading him.

“You look like you want to tell me something,” she said.

“I do,” he said. “I love you,” he said. But she wasn’t paying attention now; instead she was back looking at her phone.

“Does he look anything like the guy who was in your office today?” she asked. Jens looked over her shoulder. There was a picture of Jens Baedrup on her phone; it filled up its tiny screen. The picture was now six years old; it had been taken before Jens had drawn the cartoon, etc. The Jens Baedrup in the picture had a large, grisly black beard. He was sloppily dressed and tubby, with receding black hair in front and a wiry fan of hair over his ears and down to his shoulders. He wore thick red-framed glasses, too. Jens had always liked those glasses, even though Ilsa had thought they made him look like a clown. “Do clowns wear glasses?” he’d asked her. “They do if they’re also cartoonists,” Ilsa had said. She was right. A man who looked like that could be only one of two things: a clown or a cartoonist. And Ellen was right to ask her question, too: the stranger looked nothing like Jens Baedrup. But then again, Henry realized, neither did Henry. Over the past four years his hair had gone completely gray, and he’d lost so much of it, and he’d lost so much weight, too. He’d lost the clownish glasses, as well. You could stand Henry next to the guy in the picture and you would have a hard time arguing that they were even related, let alone the same human being.

“Somewhat,” Henry said.

“Somewhat?”

“Yes,” Henry said. Ronald hadn’t said how closely he’d examined the man coming out of Henry’s office. Ronald, Ronald. For two years, Henry had thought that Ronald was looking out for him. Now he was thinking that Ronald had it out for him, if that was the proper use of the American expression, and Henry wasn’t sure that it was. Had what out for him? Anyway, Henry decided to describe the stranger as he was, just in case Ronald had also seen him as he was. Stout, dark bearded, with tired eyes. The tired eyes made it difficult to tell how old the stranger was. Ellen listened, looking dubiously at the picture of Jens Baedrup on her phone.

“Maybe it’s not really him,” Henry said.

“It’s a weird thing to lie about,” Ellen said.

“Maybe he had surgery,” Henry said.

“Maybe he had a lot of surgery.” Ellen stroked the phone face, and the picture of Jens disappeared and a newspaper article took its place. Ellen read it, frowning. “But then again, maybe he needed a lot of surgery.”

Henry leaned back against the wall, crossed his arms over his chest, thinking of what he should say next. Now, back in their room, after seeing Ellen see the picture of the real Jens Baedrup, who looked nothing like the stranger, Jens’s plan seemed even more clearly doomed to fail. Tell her! Henry said in his mind. Shut up! he said in the same place. These were his two paths. The first seemed to lead directly to disaster. The second probably would lead there, too, but only probably, and not as directly. Plus it was the easier path to take; all he had to do to take that path was to do nothing.