Kjersti Skomsvold - The Faster I Walk The Smaller I am

The seasons changed and Epsilon started acting stranger and stranger. He told me that June’s mother had begun leaving her apartment. “Why?” I asked, realizing I’d have to be extra vigilant at the peephole before doing the same. Epsilon didn’t even try to convince me that he’d run into her by chance. “She realizes she wants more out of life,” he said. “More than canned food?” I asked, but he didn’t take the hint.

What had to happen sooner or later, happened. On the way up from the laundry room I heard steps behind me, and I knew it was June’s mother. I wanted to run, but I needed to see her. I stopped, nervous, almost feeling sick as I turned around. She was gorgeous, even more so than I remembered. She seemed very short, standing lower down on the stairs. If she wanted to look me in the eyes, she would have to tilt her head back. I told myself that she wasn’t able to. I imagined that in the eighties she’d gotten rear-ended and so had whiplash. And I couldn’t talk to her while she was standing there staring at my pockets. So I turned and ran as fast as I could up the stairs, then sneaked in through my door.

The military had made a man out of June. Now he could both make his bed and shoot a person — I could see it in his eyes. His mother had also been completely transformed this past year, during which only one special thing had happened to me, and that was when I dislocated my hip. “Now she’s going to take a course,” Epsilon said almost proudly, as if it was his doing. “In risk measurement.” “But she can’t pronounce the letter r ,” I said. “Yes, isn’t it wonderful?” Epsilon said. “She’s like a freight train now, nothing can stop her.”

Epsilon pointed to the two circles he’d drawn on the sheet of paper, one surrounding the other. “We’ll call the big circle E and the little circle M ,” he said, “and then we can say that M implies E .” “Isn’t there something of M outside of E ?” I asked. Epsilon looked from me to the drawing. “I can’t. I can’t see that,” he said, and his voice was so unfamiliar. And then, with an unsteady hand, he began to draw a third circle beside the other two, but I didn’t want to see it, so I just studied the M and the E . The third circle was approaching the E and I wanted to ask Epsilon to stop, but knew there was no point. I just stared at the big circle that surrounded the little one, my eyes filled with tears, and it became difficult to see, but then I saw, I understood. “Epsilon,” I said, but he didn’t stop, he kept drawing the third circle. “Doesn’t this also mean,” I said, “that not- E also implies not- M ?” And there, right before the circles crossed, he stopped.

I DON’T LIFT A FINGER, I’ve been sitting in the chair for days on end and I hardly pay attention to the two flies mating on my left knee. I’m wearing my hat and mumbling that German poem and I wonder why I’m so “traurig.”

I gather all my strength and walk to the bookshelf, where I take out the encyclopedia and turn to B , because sometimes clarity in one area can shed light on another. It says that even though the banana plant looks like a tree, it’s really just a big plant that has flowers without sex organs and fruit without seeds. Therefore, the banana doesn’t undergo fertilization and plays no role in the plant’s formation, and when the banana plant has lost its fruit, it dies. It was the meaninglessness of this cycle that made Buddha love the banana plant, which he believed symbolized the hopelessness of all earthly endeavors.

I identify with bananas, for not only am I hunched over, I’ve also got a flower without sex organs and fruit without seed, and therefore I am, according to Buddha, meaningless. And I also believe Buddha was on to something where the hopelessness of all earthly endeavors is concerned, because I feel hopeless; I stole from the grocery store, gave Åge B. the time, buried a time capsule, baked rolls, turned up the hot plate, tried to plan my own funeral, tried to become a tree, and then the most difficult thing of all — I used the telephone, which was really too much for me — and yet I’m still sitting here in my apartment and I’m just as afraid of living life as I am of dying. And wasn’t it Buddha who also said that everything is suffering, and I think that if I’d been religious, I would’ve been a Buddhist, and if I’d been a fruit, I would’ve been a banana.

I put down the encyclopedia and go sit at the kitchen table. Hamsun said that nothing is like being breathed on by a life, and I wish someone would ring my doorbell, even if they just ran away.

One morning, when June’s baby carriage was still on the landing, a couple of young girls rang the doorbell. “Can we watch Niels?” they asked and looked from me to the name on the door. “He’s at work,” I said. Giggling over their mistake, they looked at the door again. “What about Stein?” they asked. “He’s dead,” I said.

Another robbery might be nice, so at least when the Norwegian Gallup asked when we’d last had a visitor, I could say it wasn’t that long ago at all.

They took the TV and the Statistical Yearbook for the Kingdom of Norway, First Edition, 1880 , from which, among other things, you could learn that 4,568 insane people had been registered (not including idiots) in that year . Epsilon and I had been on summer vacation, we came out of the forest singing, but the spell was abruptly broken, because when we got to our door we realized something was wrong. “Someone’s broken the lock,” Epsilon said. “Someone’s taken the TV,” I said. “Didn’t they see the sign?” Epsilon asked. He’d written “we have an alarm” on a piece of paper, because statistics showed that it isn’t the alarm itself that prevents burglary, but rather the illusion of an alarm. “So what if we’re not a hundred-percent truthful,” I’d said when I’d hung Epsilon’s note below our welcome sign.

At first it looked like they’d just taken the TV and what little silver we had. “Thank goodness,” Epsilon said. “As long as we have each other,” I said. However, I looked with fresh eyes at the watercolors I’d painted and the homemade pearl necklace lying on the nightstand. Epsilon was surprisingly calm, but that was before he discovered the empty space on the bookshelf. Despondent, he sank down in the nearest chair. Luckily, whenever I laugh it sounds like I’m crying, so Epsilon never got suspicious.

The robbery was nice. It was something to talk about. I myself talked about it for several years, and when he’d gotten a little distance on things, Epsilon could talk about it too.

Even if I don’t have the energy to go out, I can always open the window. I’m painfully aware that the light breeze I feel whenever Åge B. breathes on me is nearly like my breathing on myself, so maybe I should try to breathe on people other than Epsilon, because it would be nice to mean something to someone. For me at least. However, I haven’t even managed to retrieve the newspaper from the doormat the last few days. The papers are probably piling up, and I wonder how long it’ll be before someone thinks I might be dead.

Speaking of which, when I close the window and go into the living room to turn on the TV, I find a man who can talk to the dead. “But where are they exactly?” the host asks him. “Where’s the Internet?” the man replies.

Einar Lunde is talking again, about everything that’s happened over the last day or so. Then the meteorologist comes on and says that Mary the storm is heading for the coast. It hits me like a fist in the gut. Surely I’m faster than Mary. And then I know what I have to do. There’s no way to avoid it. “Mary, Mary, quite contrary,” I say and head for the empty bedroom.