Tor Ulven - Replacement

This evening the rug next to the bed stays put, which means that he can sit there and unbutton his shirt without having to worry about keeping his balance, a good thing, because unbuttoning his shirt is a real task, it’s a project in and of itself, his stiff and shaking fingers struggle with every single button, because the tiny, flat discs are always slipping away, but today he manages it, despite the fact that he’s sweating and that he can’t see too well in the darkness, or half-darkness, or shadow; it’s a relief every time the stubborn friction between a button and its hole gives way, and the button slides out with only a slight nudge, it’s a triumph every time, to split his shirt steadily in two. Now it’s dark and he’s lying in bed next to the firewall. First there’ll be a heavy thud inside the chimney, followed by a rapid, intermittent hissing, and then the whole business will repeat itself, and then will come the thump of feet on the attic stairs; the chimney sweep arrives early in the morning and the sounds are made by his tools: an iron ball on a chain, and attached to the chain a broom with flexible metal bristles, the ball probably forcing the broom to the bottom of the chimney, while the bristles knock the soot off the walls: ball, chain, and broom are then drawn up again, while the more or less pulverized soot drifts down to the basement, where it’s swept through a special hole. But not today. The chimney sweep comes in the spring, in the spring and in the autumn, two times a year. The older you get, the easier you are to entertain. He wonders if he’ll ever hear the sounds made by the chimney sweep’s tools again.

It’s better to sweat than to freeze, he thinks, but it’s not good to sweat. From where he’d sat beneath the umbrella on the café’s terrace he could almost see it all, a cartographic perspective, a bird’s-eye view, and the sand didn’t look like it had steadily crept up from the coast, as it’s done for centuries, but like a dull, sluggish river of glass had flowed down the valley to harden at the bay, and through the heat haze he could just make out a flock of small, white, apparently motionless sails framed by two green land masses; it was only by focusing on one of them that he could see how the distance between a boat and, for example, one of the islands steadily decreased, until the sail was completely lost to sight behind it.

It’s dark now. But not completely dark, because a little light still slips in through the curtains, both through the small gap in the middle (which is only a few centimeters wide, and on either side of that bright slit the hem stands out as two thick, dark streaks that shrink or vanish when the fabric is twisted inside or out) and through the fabric itself, whose pattern (stylized clowns, sea lions, circus horses, and elephants repeating at regular intervals) is almost invisible, as if it’s been washed out. This creates an unusual effect, something you can’t see when it’s light inside and dark outside (although now it’s dark inside and light outside), namely a trace of the weave, the crisscrossing threads that together make up the curtains, like when someone draws a shirt over your head and you struggle against it, and you can see light through the fabric, but not anything else outside the fabric, and your breath leaves a stain on the cloth, and when your head finally emerges (with force) through the neck you can see a damp spot on your breast. You immediately forget it, and when you remember it again, the spot is already gone.

Not complete darkness, but a kind of darkness would descend after she’d placed her thumb with its long, red nail upon the switch (like a stubby, round nose that grows when the light goes out), after she’d closed the book and leaned over you, and her pearl necklace had brushed the hollow of your neck, which had felt cold and ticklish, so she’d had to hold it up with one hand, while she’d pressed her cheek into yours, and you could smell her perfume and also a hint of the day’s dinner (mutton stew with a sickening, sludgy, grayish-white consistency, with tough, cartilaginous pieces of meat and hard peppercorns that explode like firecrackers of taste when you bite into them; you can’t leave off, you do it until they tell you to stop, spit them out, and put them on the rim of your plate); so a hint of mutton stew on her hair and clothes. If she’d left the door open, light would’ve fallen into the room, but she won’t do it, she refuses, she says you’ve got to get used to being by yourself in the dark, otherwise you’ll never get used to it, you’ve been in school for two years now, there’s nothing dangerous in the dark; so no light comes in from the living room, only a little from the window.

You’ll build a machine. You’ll have it finished by tomorrow or at the very least the day after. Of course, you could also practice jumping so far from the bed that you won’t need a machine, but that strikes you as impossible, you can’t even keep up in gym class; therefore, you’ll build a machine. There’s no point trying to tell yourself that darkness changes nothing; maybe she believes that, maybe she doesn’t, but in any case it’s wrong, because darkness happens, it fills a space, and it could also be full of something, like the way a drawer is full of silverware, or the earth is full of insects that scatter in panic when you lift a rotten log, even though darkness could also be a balloon, a balloon filled with black air. But every time your bare feet touch the ground (or, rather, the Mickey Mouse rug beside your bed), the same fear grips you, because something could be down there, there’s enough room beneath the bed to hold skinny, bony arms with long, calloused fingers (or claws) that’ll stretch out and grab you by your ankles, just like aunts do when they want to see how scrawny you’ve gotten (their fingers clamp around your legs like iron shackles for a few long seconds until they let go), but these will never let go, instead they’ll jerk you back hard and fast so that you tumble to the ground, and then they’ll drag you into the darkness beneath the bed, and you don’t want to imagine what’ll happen then, the very thought makes your palms sweat and you have to dry them on the bedspread; but it’s hot in here too, so maybe that’s why you’re sweating, it’s still summer, after all. It’ll be a sweeper machine with two long, crablike arms, but the arms will end in rotating steel brooms instead of pincers, and they’ll be mobile, and the brooms will scour the space beneath the bed from corner to corner, and if they actually find something, they’ll sweep it up as mercilessly as a street sweeper clearing the roads in spring, and the machine will open wide and swallow the thing whole, securely trapping it within its metallic breast, and the brooms will stop sweeping, and a red light on top will start blinking, and an alarm (like a clanging bell) will start to ring. Then it’ll be time to call the police, so they can come fetch whatever’s trapped inside, though you’ll have to keep away any careless or curious people, since they might accidentally open up the machine, and then the thing might escape, and then the police will have come for nothing; but when they’ve hauled the “monster” away, then maybe you can see it down in some animal pit (like a bear pit in a small-town zoo, round concrete holes that let you watch from the rim while big, snarling bears pick their way across rocks and claw-marked stumps), where it can’t get at you, you think, where despite its horror it’s powerless, and perhaps you’ll get to poke it with a long stick or a ski pole, and when it whimpers in pain, you’ll know it’s just getting what it deserves, neither more nor less than that, that its reign of terror is truly over, that now there’s nothing beneath the bed, that the space is empty, and that in emptiness lies safety.