Kjersti Skomsvold - The Faster I Walk The Smaller I am

I contemplate the top half of my reflection in the mirror and practice my lines, I ask for Mathea Martinsen in Haugerud: fast and slow, emotional and indifferent, with and without bangs. Finally, I have my lines down.

I speak loud and clear so that my words will reach the person on the other end of the line, they might have to travel a long distance.

“Do you want to be connected?” the man asks.

“No no no!” I shout.

“Oh, okay,” the man is as surprised as I am at my outburst. He gives me the number, I write it in the air in front of me, and I ask him to repeat the last few numbers one more time, so as to show off my communication skills.

“Thank you for calling,” he says.

“Thank you for answering,” I say.

I call and ask for my number until the evening news comes on, and I use a different voice every time. When I die, the operators will ask, mournfully: “Do you remember Mathea, she set the all-time record for number of requests, she was number one on our Top Ten list, do you remember how busy we were back then?”

I accomplished something today, I think to myself as I switch on Einar Lunde. Thankfully, Jon Gelius is out of the picture. I actually accomplished something, I tell myself again, I became someone, you can’t sweep Mathea Martinsen under the rug anymore.

Today’s guest on the Sunday news is an old woman who’s won the King’s Gold Medal of Merit. For fifty years, rain or shine, she’d get up at six every morning, put on boots, grab a sweater, and walk to her little shed in the garden to record the weather measurements for the last twenty-four hours, before going back to her house and reporting her findings to the Meteorological Institute. It seems like a very important task, and she keeps a big lock on the little shed in the garden, probably to keep people from tampering with her stuff, otherwise someone on their way home from a bar might pee in her measuring cup and yell, “I’ve got some yellow rain for you, grandma!” Now she’s at the castle receiving her medal, and I’m sitting here and seeing how much she’s accomplished. She’s even a year younger than I am, and you don’t get to be a guest on the Sunday evening news by calling Information and asking for your own telephone number. Suddenly, I realize they might have known it was me asking for my own number. I’m the world’s biggest joke, I’ll definitely be a joke at the Information office. Einar Lunde smiles at the lady with the medal and I don’t know what I should do, all I can do is compensate with another joke, so I choose the one about the pajamas. But no one laughs.

“MATHEA MARTINSEN— deeply loved, dearly missed ,” I write at the top of a page and underline it. “ You were always loving, gentle, and kind, you departed this world before your time, with future achievements waiting in line .” I draw a thirty-degree angle with Epsilon’s protractor. I try to think of something cheerful, like the fact that as a member of the Housing Association I get a ten percent discount on my coffin and gravestone, but that just depresses me more. Surely I can think of something that doesn’t involve funerals or hot plates. I take out a new sheet of paper and start writing.

3. Become a Christian. I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me will live, even though he dies. One Easter morning I was feeling religious, but then on the evening news they showed a cupboard full of human skulls. “That’s why I don’t like watching the news,” Epsilon says. “I don’t want to risk seeing a cupboard full of human skulls.”

4. Pretend I’m a tree. One time I saw Yoko Ono on TV, she had an exhibit: trees growing from coffins. Being a tree must be boring, to just stand there and stare. I’d know: I stand and stare quite a lot. Nonetheless, I decide to walk out into the woods and see what it feels like to be a tree, maybe it’s better than I think.

On my way to Lutvann, I see a dog peeing on a pine, I give him a disapproving glare and mumble a few ugly words. I walk on and it feels like my insides are celebrating that I’m back in the woods again. I recognize the roots and stones on the path, the trees stand like they’ve always done, and it’s nice to feel like they’ve been waiting for me. “You don’t look a day older,” I say. “You look quite a bit younger,” they say, “and your bangs are very cute.” Without warning I stumble across an anthill and I gasp a little. But when I raise my eyes, the lake is still there, even though someone once dug a leaky tunnel beneath it, and somewhere out there is a meringue made of air and a stone that couldn’t swim.

I walk farther along the water’s edge toward the place where Epsilon and I used to camp. Before Stein drowned, we spent our summers here, and now it’s nearly summer again. I sit down on a tree stump and eavesdrop on the conversation taking place above my head.

Not even a little gray bird, which sings amidst the flowers and leaves, will I find on the other side, and this is a thought that grieves. Not even a little gray bird, and never a birch standing white, but on the most beautiful summer day, I have longed for that land of night.

I also talk a little, almost harmonizing with the birdsong. “Do you remember the time you ate lichen after you lost that bet, and you were sick to your stomach for a week?” I ask. “A week?” Epsilon says. “I was sick for months. I don’t think I’m over it yet.”

For the sake of our health, or more likely because we had nothing better to do, I thought up a morning exercise routine on the beach. I was the teacher, Epsilon was the slow, reluctant student. But sometimes I think he had fun doing it. “It’s like riding a horse,” he told me when I forced him to do knee bends. He could be an oddball. “That’s a clever image, Epsilon,” I said. “Thank you.”

In the evenings, I tried to talk him into skinny-dipping with me because it sounded romantic, but he refused to follow me into the water after an unfortunate episode with a jellyfish. They can bite, you know, and even though we were far away from both salt water and jellyfish, he didn’t want to risk anything. I could only talk him into wading in the nude, and so that’s what we did.

Before we went to sleep, Epsilon read to me about standard deviations and confidence intervals and I held the flashlight. Soon both I and the flashlight were out, but I’m sure Epsilon kept reading by the light of the moon, and it feels nice to have someone awake while you’re falling asleep.

Epsilon woke me one Sunday morning by saying, “Orienteering. You’d be a natural.” I pinched myself in the arm. “But aren’t you afraid I’ll get hurt?” I asked. In a daze, I sat up against the headboard. “This isn’t about me anymore,” he said. But it was all about him.

The local athletic club had put up fliers saying that on Midsummer’s Day they were going to hold an orienteering race for amateurs. When the day arrived, I stood at the starting line and Epsilon stood on the sidelines with his thumb up, he always did tend to exaggerate. They fired the starting shot and I ran in a near panic from the crowd. I flew over rocks and grass, and checkpoints leaped out at me like distress signals in a fog. Before I knew it, I saw the finishing line and the spectators — waiting there to cheer on the winner. I stopped, turned around, and went home.

“I stood there forever,” Epsilon said when he came in the door, it was pretty late. “What happened?” He didn’t sound the least bit worried. Instead, he sounded irritated. “You tell me,” I said from the chair in the living room.

He went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. “Hey!” he shouted. “Who put my toothbrush on the foot scrubber?”