Tor Ulven - Replacement

The dream trolley. It’s got the following association for you: you were standing at a trolley stop (a real one, not a dream one), it was a sun-warmed and robust summer evening, you were on your way to town to meet some friends, and the young woman (was she young? it was hard to tell, you think, she might’ve been in her early thirties, like you are right now) next to you, who had a scarf wrapped around her head (maybe because she had lost her hair?) and an odd dark, reddish-brown cast to her face, had suddenly turned toward the wall and vomited, once, twice, three times, then had simply wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and continued to wait for the trolley. She didn’t speak, didn’t sway, didn’t tremble, didn’t smile. She’d just turned around and vomited. She seemed silent and grave, but it wasn’t the gravity of deep thought or true conviction, she was simply solemn, as if she was in a lot of pain. You pay for two blank, ninety-minute cassettes with exact change.

Someone is standing motionless on the footbridge. As you get closer you see that it’s a middle-aged woman in a gray coat, and that she’s thrown something, it’s impossible to say what, over the rail, and that now she’s following it with her eyes. Afterward, she turns around and walks toward you. As you pass one another, you seem to see a secret smile of forbidden pleasure playing across her face. Since you aren’t wearing a scarf, you tighten your tie and turn up your jacket collar, it’s especially cold in the middle of the bridge where you’re now standing, since it’s unprotected from the natural wind, and since the cars perpetually passing beneath you create a kind of artificial wind, an intermittent breeze, as you continue to lean against the railing, positioned almost dead center on the bridge, right where the arc reaches its apex, as if the bridge were made of elegantly carved marble with lion sculptures adorning either end, instead of concrete, steel, and asphalt, and as if the highway beneath you were a peaceful river winding through some famous tourist town.

She doesn’t have a soul, she’s dead, she’s not in any pain. The kicker, though, is that you can’t be sure, you can never be sure, it’s a perpetual uncertainty on both the universal and the individual levels, you think, and not only can’t you be absolutely certain she doesn’t have an immortal soul (that’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it: if you said there was a faraway planet with aliens who’ve got anthills for heads, and every ant is omniscient and eternal, and each ant has a smaller anthill for a head, and every ant is omniscient and eternal, and so on, no one could disprove it; oh well), you also don’t even know if she’s really dead; even now, with the two year anniversary of her disappearance coming right up (you don’t have to look at the calendar to know it’s coming up, you think, like it’s tattooed across on your brain in red ink, like it’s been written in bright neon letters that never quit, that glow day and night). Theoretically, she could just reappear out of nowhere, she could return from adventuring in an exotic land, she could come back from a steaming jungle chockfull of cackling beasts and strangling vines, and be exactly the same, just two years older, the same exact person, large as life, herself, exactly the same.

You don’t believe it, though. You’re not one of those people who still carry around a futile hope after five years, twenty years, twenty-five years have passed, and you remember what the psychiatrist said, how when someone finally convinces themselves to do it, they get excited, cheerful, they seem happy, energetic, and everyone thinks they’re getting better, but in fact they’re not getting better, they’re just grimly, morbidly happy because they’ve finally decided to do it, and you remember what that train engineer said, how the bright headlights had shown a woman headed straight for the tracks, how she’d had a great big smile on her face, an apparently happy smile, a last happy smile, before she got splattered all over the front of the train, but it wasn’t her, that was just a documentary you heard on the radio, and it was awful to listen to, but you listened to it nonetheless. It couldn’t have been her, because her body was never found, although you’re sure she’s dead, and the worst part is, you can’t be sure she doesn’t have a soul, and, therefore you can’t be sure she’s not in hell, you don’t think she is, it goes against all reason to think that, but what really gnaws at you is that there’s no way to be absolutely one hundred percent sure. It doesn’t help to tell yourself that these aren’t thoughts you’ve freely chosen, that they’re thoughts that have been forced upon you, they’re thoughts that think against you, they’re thoughts like an executioner’s tongs around your limbs, they’re thoughts that push and shove and herd you into a corner, though you have no idea why they want you there, only that they do in fact want you there. You realize now that you’ve got a death grip on the aluminum metal railing, and that you don’t have your gloves on, and that your fingers are freezing. You shove your hands into your pockets. A big trailer with a flapping tarpaulin throws ice-cold air your way as it vanishes beneath your feet.

The dog is enormous, it comes to above his thigh, it has thick gray fur, it looks like a cross between a musk ox and a wolf, and even though the young man with the leather jacket has got it on a leash, you can tell the older man with the gray beard is still afraid. The young man’s voice is low but intense; all you can hear are snippets. we don’t own the exclusive rights to joie de vivre. and . some must sacrifice so that others. You see that the bushes and trees out in front of the building have been swaddled in burlap against the coming winter. Religious people, you think, drone on about the mortal coil and the soul shaking off its earthly bonds, and in a way she is free, because she’s well beyond the reach of all sickness, all injury, all breast cancer, arthritis, psoriasis, kidney failure, angina pectoris, blindness, hemiplegia, appendicitis, diabetes, brain tumors, blood clots, slipped discs, muscular atrophy, fractured thighs, cuts, cerebral hemorrhages, the list would go on forever, you think, if you cataloged every misfortune that could befall someone over a long lifetime; when you come right down to it, she’s as invulnerable as a fluffy white cloud floating over a bloody battlefield on a bright summer’s day, but she’s not floating, you think, because she’s not in heaven, she’s lying in the ground, waiting, maybe she’s lying in the same ground you walk over every day, just lying there waiting, because if she’s going to go to hell, then she’s not there yet, in fact, she’s got no idea hell exists, she’s past all earthly experience, to put it bluntly, she’s dead, literally dead to the world, and, therefore she has no concept of time, which means that the time spent waiting is like no time at all, and even if thousands of years were to pass between Judgment Day and the resurrection, it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference to her, and the fact that you can be walking around knowing that Judgment Day and the resurrection haven’t happened yet doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference to her, because she has no knowledge of it, and when she’s raised from the dead and wakes up in hell, the transition will be instantaneous, speaking phenomenologically, it’ll feel like she was never gone at all, the transition from her very last moments of life on Earth to an eternity in hell will be direct, after all, the dead don’t care if only ten days or a whole ten thousand years have passed between the moment of death and the day of resurrection, which just goes to show, you think, that these religious hypotheses are presumptuous, to say the least, because they nullify time as a dimension, and they punish those sins and reward those good deeds that were committed in time outside of time.