Janne Drangsholt - The Marvelous Misadventures of Ingrid Winter

He put his foot on the threshold. I held on to the doorknob even tighter, ready to close it.

“Do you have children?”

His breath smelled like cigarettes. I pictured his black lungs, with scarcely any openings for the oxygen, decaying a little more each day from the toxins. I wondered if he knew that cigarettes contain a substance that numbs your throat so you don’t feel how much it hurts when you inhale the smoke.

“I have children, yes.”

“How old are they?”

“They’re…” I took a breath and plucked up my courage. “You know, now’s not a good time. Perhaps you could come back another time?”

“They all say that,” he said, sounding irritated. “Well, let me just jot down your name and phone number, because this is an offer you’re not going to want to miss!”

“Actually there’s no point in your calling, because we’re selling the house. I’m actually having an open house now, so it’s as good as sold. You’ll have to talk to the new owners.”

He laughed and shook his head.

“You haven’t sold it yet. We’ll just see how that goes.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You’ve heard of the housing market crash, right?”

He made an explosion sound with his mouth and illustrated with his hands everything being blown to smithereens.

“I hope for your sake that you haven’t bought a new place yet.”

“I have to go,” I said and tried to shut the door, but his foot was in the way.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“It’s… Anne Undheim,” I told him.

“Uh-huh. And your phone number?”

I made up one of those as well.

“Great. I strongly recommend that you get an alarm system. You know what happens when someone breaks into your home? They don’t just steal, you know. They make a mess and ruin your stuff. They urinate on your walls. They stick your toothbrushes into unmentionable orifices.”

“What?”

He winked at me.

“You can avoid all that with an alarm system. I’ll give you a call on Monday! But then I’ll expect to come inside. It’s really outrageous to be left standing outside like this!”

He gave me a slightly accusatory look and only slowly removed his foot. Once his foot was out of the way, I pushed the door shut with all my might and hurriedly locked it. My heart was racing. I had survived, but only just.

The people for the open house didn’t arrive until a good while after the appointed time. I had planned a few choice remarks about unpleasant Swedish alarm salesmen, but opening the door, I became distracted by how tall they were. They were so tall that I actually suspected them of being replicants. Especially since the male looked suspiciously like Rutger Hauer, and the female had a particularly meticulous hairdo that I had only ever seen in ads. Her short black hair stood straight up in a sort of a swoop to the left, which until I saw it I would have doubted was even possible to pull off in real life.

“Welcome,” I said, compensating for my lack of height and my limp hair by squeezing their hands extra hard during my handshake.

“Thank you,” they said and removed their shoes.

Despite their potential replicant status, I was happy to see that they were my age. Plus they both had steady jobs in the financial sector, so surely they also had actual money. The last private showings had been to two young couples currently renting basement apartments who should have been touring a “spiffy town house with sunny patio.”

All I had to remember in order to land this was that replicants weren’t the easiest to communicate with. Because their memories had been implanted, not experienced firsthand, it was hard for them to understand the emotional aspects of human life. Irony also wasn’t their forte.

But beyond a doubt they were equipped with an interest in interior design, because I could hear them talking about knocking down walls, building a loft, and putting in recessed lighting. They stood for a long while debating the purpose of the owl decals that adorned Alva’s bedroom wall. They concluded that they’d been put there to spruce up the space and give it the feel of a child’s bedroom. They also agreed the owls could probably be removed.

Easy peasy, I thought.

“Are you guys always so tidy?” she asked as they came back downstairs.

“We like to keep the place clean,” I said. “It gives us peace of mind.”

“But surely not as clean as this?”

“No, maybe not exactly this clean, but it’s not so far off.”

She stared at me as if she were trying to read my mind.

“I hardly believe that,” she finally concluded.

“Suit yourself.”

“Who put the owls on the wall?”

“I did.”

“I don’t like owls. Can they be removed?”

“Of course.”

“Can you prove that?”

“They’re decals. They come off.”

“Can you prove that?”

She stood and watched while I tried to remove one of the owls without damaging the paint. The hard edges of the decal cut in under my fingernails, but I held on to a straight face. When I was done, she ran her hand over the wall.

“No damage, right? No marks that I can see, anyway.”

She moved her head slightly and I chose to interpret that as a faint nod. Standing like that, she actually reminded me of an owl herself.

“Do you have any children?” I asked.

They exchanged glances, as if they didn’t understand my question.

“Children aren’t compatible with our lifestyle,” Rutger Hauer finally said.

“We’ve never considered it,” she added.

“Would you like to take a look at the outside?”

“Could we see how the gas fireplace works?” he asked.

I picked up the remote control and turned it on.

“Can’t you make the flames any bigger?”

“Yes.”

I opened the panel and turned up the dial that controlled the heat.

“Is that the highest?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t get it any higher?”

“No.”

“Can you see the flames from the yard?”

“When you’re sitting on the patio?” I asked confusedly.

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never tried.”

“Let’s do that now, then,” Rutger Hauer said.

“Sure.”

They went outside, and I opened the panel and turned the heat all the way up. I peered out at the two of them standing side by side in the yard. It was hard to tell if they were satisfied or not, so I gave them the thumbs-up with a questioning look. They made a vague hand gesture that could mean anything from “very nice” to “far below average.” Maybe they were replicant models that didn’t come with the hand-gesture package preinstalled, or maybe they had not had much of an introduction to empathy.

I was crying as I walked downtown to the library, but luckily it was raining. In response to Bjørnar’s question about whether it had gone well, I told him they were replicants, which made it hard to relate to them and also made them impossible to read.

“Remind me what replicants are again?”

“Humanlike cyborgs with implanted memories, who can only be detected with questions that elicit their fundamental lack of empathy.”

“And the movie we’re talking about is…?”

“ Blade Runner .”

“Exactly. And you think they’re replicants because…?”

“I guess they just gave me a replicant vibe.”

He nodded and was quiet for a minute, and I hoped his silence meant that things were looking up between us and that he didn’t think it mattered that I thought they were humanlike cyborgs.

“Are replicants allowed to own property?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but I kind of hope so.”

I didn’t mention my suspicions to the real estate agent, but just said I thought the showing had gone well. When she called them, though, they denied having ever seen the place and said they weren’t interested in buying a house, anyway.