Nicolai Houm - The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland

“Yes, of course.”

“Not that I get epileptic fits or anything,” she said cheerfully, imitating a few twitchy spasms as a child might, to mock the disabled.

Just as she crossed the threshold of the guest room and before she fell onto her bed, her writer’s genes forced her for a brief moment to look at the whole scene from another angle: how bizarre it must be to have an intoxicated foreign woman, a complete stranger, staying in one’s guest room.

She woke up because someone was looking at her. It was Camilla. She knocked gently on the open door and asked, “Why is Oskar here?”

“Sorry?”

Camilla pointed toward something just by Jane’s head. A perception as thin and sharp as the edge of a knife made her turn around slowly. Immediately in front of her eyes, the yellow toy from Camilla’s room was lying on her pillow.

Camilla cautiously approached the bed, as if Jane were an animal likely to bolt any second.

“Mom asked me to give you these.”

She placed an orange-and-white box of pills on the edge of the bed. One word on it jeered at her in bold type: rektal . For rectal use only. Tight-lipped, she slumped back onto the pillow. Camilla asked if something was wrong.

“No, honey. Nothing at all.”

She closed her eyes, and then opened them again. Camilla was still standing there.

“Jane?”

“Yes,” she said, staring up at the ceiling.

“In your book. There was something printed inside. On one of the first pages.”

A long pause, and then it came.

“Who are Greg and Julie?”

Afterward, parts of what had happened next had been wiped from her memory, as if by an act of charity. Regrettably, she could still recall that, around ten o’clock that evening, she was lying on her side trying to insert a Valium suppository when Martin, the son of the house, burst into the guest room to say hello to her.

She also remembered that Eva had asked if she was on something and that her answer had consisted largely of the word “insinuate,” repeated insistently in a loud voice. And that she had been clinging to Lars Christian when Eva escorted her, carefully but with determination, to the front door. And that Camilla didn’t cry, like Jane perhaps would have wished. She sat in the rental car outside the Askeland-Nilsen family home until dawn broke, since the one thing in the world she would never do was drive under the influence.

ON THE FIRSTmorning, they crossed the crystalline waters of a river and walked uphill through a forest about to lose its last glowing, autumnal tints. The slope was so steep that she was looking straight at the backs of Ulf’s knees.

“Freak-show animals. That’s all they’re seen as. Tourist attractions. Because they’re not native. Foreign introduction. If I had been researching wild reindeer, I’d have had an easier time of it. My own office. And so forth.”

Then he launched into a lecture on public funding of research and how it was administered, most of which Jane couldn’t follow. But she did take on board that the train killed around ten musk oxen every year because the railway lines had been cut straight through their territory.

After a while, Ulf had drawn a bit ahead of her. The distance between them grew until he was out of sight. He waited for her farther up the ridge but as soon as she caught up, he set off again. The process, which was repeated many times, meant that he got some rest but she didn’t.

“You’ll tell me if I’m walking too fast, won’t you?” Ulf said. And walked off and left her behind again.

After a few hours of this, they finally reached the plateau. The forest had ended at a line as sharp as if it had been the edge of a tilled field. They stood there for a while. The expanse around them was absolutely still. So much solid mass: you would expect it to produce some kind of sound. A vast number of stones of all sizes lay immobile in the feeble sunlight. The path continued across other ridges until details were lost in the distance. The eye could just make out, even farther away, contrasts of black and white on a faultless peak.

“Isn’t it fantastic?”

It was. To say the least.

“I feel so incredibly alive up here, at one with nature,” Ulf went on.

Jane searched for traces of irony in his face but his eyes didn’t leave the snowy mountain top. He kept looking at it as he moved close to her and put his arm around her shoulders.

“Up here is a perfect place for recharging one’s batteries.”

She giggled and felt at the same time a pang of loneliness that reached into the core of her body. It made her think about the first boy she’d slept with, a guy named Ray Dechamps, whom she had been told was a catch, partly because his older brother drove a Pontiac with flames painted on the hood.

Ulf let his hand stay on her shoulder. There was a stack of flattish stones just next to them.

“Why have the stones been put on top of each other?” she asked.

“It’s a cairn,” Ulf told her.

“What’s a cairn?”

“A marker to show where the path is.”

“But the ones over there are quite far from the path.” She pointed.

“True.”

“So why are they there?”

“People build them.”

“Why do?…”

Ulf made a tut-tut noise and started walking.

For a few seconds, Jane stood quite still with her eyes closed. Then she followed him. Low pale green shrubs that reminded her of wormwood or sage brushed against her pant legs and covered previously made trails.

The path took them high up the side of a valley with a shallow river running far below. The shimmering mist from the river hung in the air like a spider web. Jane caught up with Ulf and walked alongside him. She began talking about something she hadn’t planned to talk about—something she felt was over and done with. But then, it might be the kind of thing Ulf would approve of, what with his going on about being one with nature.

“One might begin to wonder if there isn’t something that is bigger than us.”

She spread her arms wide.

“Like what?”

“Perhaps something that exists outside or beyond the individual.”

“You don’t express yourself very clearly,” Ulf said, staring straight ahead.

“I listened to a highly regarded physicist doing one of the TED Talks and he was arguing that all systems possess a level of consciousness, and the more complex the system, the more advanced the consciousness. One possible consequence of his argument is that there is an enormous, superior consciousness.”

“God?”

Ulf said the word in a way that made it sound anesthetizingly dull.

“Not necessarily. But some force in nature, something large and powerful that our empiricism has not yet helped us to discover.” She almost had to run to keep up with him and her voice trembled. “Something we’ve perhaps avoided taking notice of, and preferred to put into a religious category?”

“Instead of what?”

“What that physicist was talking about.”

She had always been more persuasive, and sounded wiser, in writing than in speech. The discrepancy had long frustrated her and that frustration had been one of the factors that made her decide to be a writer when she was just twelve or thirteen years old. When she became a teacher, she prepared herself so thoroughly that the lessons mostly entailed reciting her own texts from memory.

Ulf stopped abruptly, looked quickly around, and then bent down to pull something off from where it grew on the side of a stone.

“Look at this!” he said, pointing to a tuft of moss.

“Where?”

“Just there.”

She looked closer. The tip of his index finger was indicating a pale, trumpet-shaped growth a little larger than the head of a pin.