Tor Ulven - Replacement

You’re waking up, or rather, you’re sobering up, your tongue feels thick and your mouth feels parched, your throat feels like a rubber hose that’s clogged with dirt or something similar, something that’s wedged in there good and tight, the hose coiled like a corkscrew, and in a last-ditch effort you wrench open first one smoke-colored drawer and then the other, rummaging through the so-called vegetable drawers that usually hold forgotten edibles, rotten carrots, moldy tomatoes, soggy cucumbers, all of them in the process of liquefying into a viscous green scum, and where, at the bottom, you miraculously discover (you must’ve put them there for safety’s sake, so to speak, because you were expecting guests, or, more precisely, because you didn’t want your guests drinking them all up) five squat, more or less neckless bottles, dewy with cold, your hands are beginning to shake, but not too bad, you’re able to unscrew the lid, there’s no point in fetching a clean glass, or a dirty one for that matter, you chug the liquid straight from the bottle, while your hands quiver like some electrical gadget, rivulets of cold foam streaming out of your mouth, down your neck, dripping onto the white breast of your shirt, but you get most of it down, you’re drinking beer, naturally, only losers stoop to hard liquor, how disgusting, you think, you’d just puke it right back up again, but this is beer, cold beer from the fridge.

They swell and fizzle, the small, thin, transparent membranes form domes that then burst all along the glass’s rim, extending out almost over it, so that it looks like foam rubber, no, you think, something living, something that’s in perpetual motion, a motion that is actually a decline, because the number of gas bubbles entering the liquid itself (perfect miniature globes that ascend quick as lightning, one after the other, virtually single file, as if they’re following an invisible thread, which is completely perpendicular or maybe slightly bent) is less than those departing (the foam spheres that burst), and you notice how the soft pillow of foam begins to sink together in the middle, and you know that if you wait long enough the whole crackling, quivering blanket of foam will be reduced to an irregular whitish margin around the glass’s inner circumference, with a few tendrils extending down toward the drink’s surface, where a similar whitish streak will float like sea scum at the beach’s edge, and the streak will waver when you lift the glass to take a drink; but right now the foam is still high, the bursting bubbles are large, and when you lift the glass to your lips, the fizzing gets louder, and you get a foam mustache on your upper lip, which you wipe off with the back of your hand as you set the glass down.

Tranquility. A feeling of deep tranquility sets in after you finish your second bottle, and you uncap the third with ease. A cheerful feeling is bubbling up inside your breast, a profound relief that the anthropophagic winter morning can no longer eat you alive, that you can simply watch the intersection from your window, where the morning rush is just starting to thin out, and it’s beginning to snow, and new-fallen snow is swirling around car tires like goose down, and in a sparsely trafficked side street there’s a pale mist, like cigarette smoke distributing evenly across a surface, or like sheer gauze, hanging over tire marks in the old snow, and if you press your nose and cheek against the cold window and squint down to the end of the street, as far as your eyes can reach, you can see how the contours of the building and street disappear into the warm vagueness of falling snow, hundreds of thousands of swirling flakes culminating in gray opaqueness, which after nearly three bottles of beer strikes you as poignant and beautiful. Suddenly, you remember (and feel a burning pain well up inside you, like northern lights shooting across your emotional horizon, like a form of emotional rheumatism) that once upon a time you stood exactly as you’re standing now and watched her change from a leisurely strolling shadow to a clearly defined individual, as she was emerging from the falling snow: first she was just an anonymous, dark shape, who could’ve been any Tom, Dick, Harry, or Jane (as most people are Tom, Dick, Harry, or Jane to you), and it was just a simple, more or less random spark of intuition that told you to focus on that shape in particular, and as she got closer, you realized that there was a chance, an increasingly good chance that it might be her, and then you’d recognized her clothes and her walk, and finally you’d felt the eureka that comes from recognizing a face at a distance (when the face is still alien, simply a schematic face, a face that could belong to anybody, but at the same time uniquely individual), and then you’d seen her stop at the door. A moment afterward, after you’d spoken with her on the intercom, that is, you’d pondered the seemingly enormous chasm (in time as well as in space) between the nameless shadow you’d first observed and the familiar voice that belonged to her and her alone.

Why not? Why can’t a person do exactly what he or she wants? Because a person is supposed to act “normal”? But no one’s normal, you think. It’s just that everybody has a deep-seated fear of the things that should be said aloud, but that never are, you think. So go ahead, call her. Eat something first, though; no, grab a smoke, that’s far more important, and you start searching through pants pockets, jacket pockets, suit pockets, briefcases, and so on (all while thinking that if she were still living here, she could’ve told you exactly how many cigarettes you had and where they were), until finally you find a crumpled pack containing one smashed and two unsmashed cigarettes in the pocket of the robe you’re wearing, but then the search begins again, this time for matches or a lighter, and again you search through pants pockets, jacket pockets, suit pockets, briefcases and so forth, as well as through the three pockets of your robe, though this time you come up empty-handed, so you broaden the search to include tables, cabinets, various nooks and crannies (so to speak), but still you come up empty-handed.

You turn one burner (the smallest one) to high. You hear a phone ringing (and you can’t picture how the ringing telephone looks, since you have no memory of it, since you’ve never been there, on the other end, it’s like calling out to someone in the dark), it rings a second time, no answer, a third time, no answer, a fourth time, no answer, a fifth time, no answer; the sixth ring is abruptly cut off by someone picking up. An irritated and sleep-drunk female voice demands What? and you can’t be sure it’s her, but the voice reminds you of her, and so you say your name, and she exclaims, Oh God, not you! I though I was done with you for good; and you mumble something like I was sitting here thinking of you, thinking of the time you just appeared out of the nothingness of the falling snow, and how your voice on the intercom. and she interrupts you with Do you realize I got home at five o’clock this morning the flight was hell fucking weather we had to make an emergency landing and wait six hours before continuing on the passengers whined like little babies and some famous fuck got drunk and threw a fit and wanted to get into the cockpit and force us to land someplace or other and he insisted he had a conference to get to and to top it all off you at nine fifteen in the morning what the hell do you want? and you say I just wanted to tell you I was sitting here thinking of how beautiful you were when you came in from the snow, you had rosy cheeks and drops of melted snow in your hair, and the others (you hesitate) they were nothing, absolutely nothing, I’m completely and truly yours, and she says Pain and solace, that’s all it is with you, pain and solace, but I’m definitely not interested in your pain and there’s no way I’m going to be your solace you’re a sentimental fuck like every other brutal, sentimental fuck you get real emotional when you’re doing something shameful. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if at nine o’clock in the morning and twenty-five years of age you were already drunk, are you drunk? don’t you have some job to go to? you’re off today? why in the world would you be off today? never mind, it’s not my business, right now my business is sleeping do you hear that SLEEPING without being interrupted by your idiotic whining and your pseudo-nostalgic crocodile tears no it doesn’t help to say you’re sorry at least when you’re sober you can still remember that I don’t give a damn about you all I want is to be left alone shut the hell up, and suddenly, rage shoots through you like an electric current and you say You fucking cow you prima donna you two-faced bitch it was you who. with two. oh so sweet and charming when your ego’s telling you you’ve got the upper hand. cynical as fuck when you have nothing to gain you’re just a cash register with. though your last word, a vulgar epithet for female genitalia, doesn’t travel any farther than the microphone in the receiver, because when the conversation degenerated from dialogue to monologue, a click on the words “cash regist. ” told you she’d hung up.