Janne Drangsholt - The Marvelous Misadventures of Ingrid Winter

I shut my eyes and breathed in and out and out and in, imagining life carrying on without me as I lay in a coma after an overdose.

After a car accident.

After an operation for stress cancer.

Right at this moment my body was so heavy and weary that I almost believed I had overdosed. If I hadn’t been in the coma too long, Bjørnar would probably be sitting next to me holding my hand and saying things like, “Move your pinkie finger if you can hear me.” But if I’d been unresponsive for a month or maybe even a year, there probably wouldn’t be anyone sitting there.

By then I’d be alone except for the underpaid professional health care workers who came in once or twice a day to drain the urine out of me and wash me and massage my legs and talk to me about some singing contestant’s most recent engagement or whether the skier Petter Northug was going to have to wear a house-arrest ankle monitor for his DUI. If it had been a really long time, Bjørnar would already have a new girlfriend and would be trying to decide if he should pull the plug on me or not. Or he would at least have gotten himself a dog.

I lay in bed and shivered and moved my pinkie finger and squeezed my hand into a fist. Just to be sure.

There was an annoying sound by my head.

I fiddled with my phone for a bit, but the noise didn’t go away.

“Go away!” I cried at the room, but that didn’t help, either.

It took a long time for me to realize I needed to answer the hotel’s phone on the nightstand.

“Where are you?” a voice hissed. “We’re late!”

“Deckard?” I mumbled, still half dreaming, my mind focused on replicant-related issues.

“Who? We’re ready to leave for the opera. Everyone’s here. You have to come down now, otherwise we won’t make it.”

“I’m in a coma. Go without me.”

I hung up.

A little while later there was another infernal noise.

“Go away!” I cried again, but this time I had to get out of bed and shuffle over to the door to mute it.

It was Pretty Putin.

“I’m sick,” I said. “I have to stay in bed. So if you want me to trudge along the Neva for hours on end, you can just forget it.”

“You’ll be healthy soon,” he said and handed me a brown paper bag. “We’re not going for a walk by the Neva. We’re going to the opera.”

“But I’m sick,” I reiterated. “Fever, cough, maybe a sinus infection.”

“Like I said, you’ll be healthy soon. There’s medicine in the bag.”

“Aren’t we supposed to meet the university president tomorrow? I’d better save my energy, sleep off the fever.”

“Medicine in bag.”

I tried to sigh, but it immediately turned into coughing.

“I’ll be waiting in the lobby. You have thirteen minutes to get ready.”

“Are Peter and Ingvill waiting in the lobby, too?”

“They went on ahead, with Irina and Ivan.”

“Double honey trap.”

He stared me in the eye, and it felt like he was searching for something. I tried to look as blank as possible.

“Fine,” I finally mumbled. “I’ll meet you in the lobby in thirteen minutes.”

I walked into the bathroom and threw up. Then I opened the bag.

Tylenol, decongestant spray, and a bottle full of something that smelled strongly of alcohol. Pretty Putin had made his own diagnosis. Apparently good old-timey cough syrup was still available over the counter in Russia. I took two Tylenol, jammed the spray bottle into my nose, and took a few good swigs of the liquid in the little brown bottle, which immediately blazed a warm path down into my chest.

I took another swig, pulled a black wool dress over my head, tugged on one boot and then another, bundled myself up in my coat, and forced my body out the door and into the hallway.

On my way to the lobby, I took a detour past the exclusive bar on the top floor to make sure the icon was still there. That was a rookie move considering the entire hotel would be under surveillance by now, but I couldn’t help it. I sat down on the sofa and discreetly felt around underneath until I found the bulky item.

For a second, it almost felt like the little package gave me an infusion of energy. And hope. It was as if it were radiating some kind of heat, and I started wondering if it really was a sacred painting. For all I knew, the dean might have gotten it from some functionary during his KGB days, in thanks for his assistance or as some form of bribe. In which case it really might be valuable. To a lot of people.

But right now it was mine and I rested my fingers on the warm, oddly comforting bulk for a bit before I took a deep breath and headed downstairs to fight yet another battle with Pretty Putin.

He blew off my suggestion that we take a cab to the opera, so I was forced to pull my hand-knitted wool cap down over my ears and stuff my hands deep into my pockets. My throat was scratchy and I wished I could find a place that sold lozenges. Saint Petersburg seemed to be full of scrap-metal dealers.

“You know it’s a complete waste to take Ingvill to the opera,” I said. “She’s the world’s least talented linguist.”

He smiled.

“What are you smiling at?” I asked.

“Your alliance is already showing obvious cracks.”

“There’s no alliance,” I said. “We’ve never been a team.”

He didn’t respond. He was probably trying to psych me out, but he’d forgotten to consider the cough syrup. Because although I was weak, it also felt like my insides were some kind of soft pudding or jelly, and I regarded my surroundings with a sense of indifference I couldn’t remember ever having felt.

My entire youth had been filled with strategies—counting ten yellow houses, jumping over puddles, avoiding shadows, walking only on the left side of streets, thinking positively, anything to ensure my survival.

To ensure that things would go well.

Which they very rarely did. But I had Bjørnar. And the kids. And I was secretly confident that things would have gone much less well if I hadn’t managed to count ten yellow houses or not worn my very best sweater. And even though these sorts of concrete strategies had evolved to become subtler and more focused on the power of my mind and the creation of magic shields, there was no doubt that my everyday existence was still filled with the whole same exhausting business.

I giggled.

“Why are you laughing?”

“I was thinking about Stalin. To be totally honest, he was a little funny looking.”

He didn’t respond.

“I guess it mostly comes down to how you feel about receding hairlines. Personally I prefer Gorbachev. Wasn’t there a pop song about him? Do you remember the one I’m talking about?”

I started humming.

“How much cough syrup did you take?”

“The right amount.”

The icon. That was what he wanted. We should have just given it back the first day. I could have brought it downstairs when we met to go to the Hermitage and said, “Look what I found on the floor,” or “Look what Peter brought back from the dean’s office. He thought it was a present. He’s not all that bright.” And then we could have bonded and become good friends. They probably already figured Peter had some kind of mental issue because of his urban bowler, so it wouldn’t have been hard to convince them that he had been included in our group via some type of special program.

But for some reason I couldn’t wrap my brain around at the moment, I had insisted that we hide the thing instead. And pretend we had no idea how or why it had disappeared.

And now I was going to die.

Not that it mattered. I mean, I’d been expecting that my whole life.

The catastrophe was finally here.

It was all over.