JIM ⋅ SEPTEMBER 2006
JIM SLEPT FITFULLY, and in his sleep he turned as a dog turns in its basket to find a position that would give his body peace. He was crying, but he didn’t know that. Deep down in his sleep he was going to die. He was in despair, he was trying to tell her he was going to die and explain to her why, and she got so upset it was almost a comfort, as if his dying made a greater impression on her than it did on him, but he didn’t know why he was going to die, and really, there was no comfort. He was alone. Only he was going to die. And he knew that one day soon she would get over it and to everyone’s surprise, would have put it behind her, forgotten it already, or hidden it inside herself, the size of a shirt button.
When he woke up he was still going to die. It was over. It was all over. From the kitchen table he had swept any future he might have into a bucket that he carried out and emptied by the hedge. His life was at half-mast. He barely reached his own hips. He dragged himself along on his knees, the cross was heavy and sharp against his shoulder. I’m so thirsty, he thought and they give me only vinegar to drink.
He opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling. In the dream he was still living in Mørk. My God, he thought, it’s Sunday school. The little yellow pavilion down by the creek, by Rumble Creek, as they called it, and you could hear it rumble and boom in the spring and rumble through the closed windows, and anyone with their wits about them would want to go out and watch it flow and wade in Lill Rapids with water up to the edge of their boots and let the water press hard and gently too against the palms of their hands until they could barely hold them still.
His mother had said that the two hours every Sunday morning were of great benefit and that later in life he would think back to the dim room with the chairs in a horseshoe by the wall and Rumble Creek flooding its banks on the other side of the same wall, and find help and comfort in that, and it might well be that she had a point, but Tommy never came, his father didn’t allow him. His father thought it was nonsense. All that Jesus stuff.
In the Sunday school building the flannelboard stood on three legs in the corner with its palm trees of felt, its crescents and disciples. The Good Samaritan lay in the box underneath, ready for action, and Lazarus rising from the grave, alive and kicking, was in the box, and Jesus entering Jerusalem with the multitudes streaming from their houses to cover the dust with palm branches of felt before the felt donkey he was riding. He was the King of the Jews. He was the Son of David. In all his dignity, he came down from the Mount of Olives with the road to Jericho probably at his back to the east, and slowly he rode down the slope through Gethsemane where events of great significance would unfold in a matter of days between the gnarled olive trees and tall cypresses of felt, and on he rode the donkey up towards the town walls and the Lions’ Gate or Damascus Gate or another gate entirely with another name on another side of town, if they were there at that time. The Gates. And it went as badly as it possibly could. A few days later he would collapse and graze his knees on the hard stone slabs of the ascending Via Dolorosa with the kiss of death still burning on his cheek and the heavy cross chafing his shoulder, and all that for thirty pieces of silver, my God, was that all I was worth, he thought, and not as I will but as you will, he had said to his father the night before, for this wasn’t what Jesus had thought up for himself, that he should crawl on his knees up this narrow path of stone. And of course he was afraid, who wouldn’t be, and Jim flitted in and out of this new dream with his eyes open, and then someone came who wanted to help Jesus and take the cross off his shoulders to lighten his burden and perhaps carry it himself for a stretch. And the man who took the cross was Simon of Cyrene. He was the father of Alexander and Rufus, it said in the text, but who cared about them, what had they done to deserve a place in the book of books. You had to make yourself worthy, that was the point, Jim thought, you have to be worthy of it, or else nothing could be measured against anything and everything would blur. But perhaps they were friends, Simon and Jesus, and perhaps Jesus had given Simon of Cyrene a helping hand not long before, or even performed a miracle for Simon exclusively, you could imagine that, that they supported each other as Tommy and Jim had done when they were sitting behind the mill or lying on their backs in the dip so that no one could see them, right up to the year they turned eighteen.
But that wasn’t how it was. The man called Simon wouldn’t help anyone of his own free will. I stick my head out for nobody, he might have said, like Bogart in Casablanca. It was the soldiers of the Roman empire who forced him to lift the cross, at gunpoint, so to speak, or at the point of a spear to his neck, to be precise, so that Jesus would arrive at Golgotha in one piece, at Calvary, to be hanged on the Cross between the two thieves, and not perish too early in the streets below, that was why. And Simon of Cyrene wasn’t even one of the disciples, the chosen twelve, he wasn’t called Peter after Simon, and he wasn’t a fisherman, either, he was from the country, and people from the country, from places like Mørk, had always been slow, unwilling, they had no rebellion in them and took no chances if they could get out of it with honour intact, yes, even without honour they preferred to lay low whatever was at stake, and then you had to make them, that was how it had always been, they had to be pulled and pushed.
At some point he had moved from the sofa in the living room into his bed. The air in the room was stale and smoke-filled, not only from his own cigarettes, and was expanding cube-like and dense against the walls and the ceiling and longed to get out. He sat up and his mouth was dry, his face was, and he swung his legs stiffly on to the carpet and walked into the living room towards the balcony door. Outside, the cold air stood tall as a man and pressed against the window and waited and was sucked in when he opened the door and the smoke was sucked out at the same time. For a brief moment there was much traffic around his body, and then he had to hurry back to his bed and lie under the duvet, and it wasn’t morning any more, and the scent of someone else’s body still lingered on the sheet, on the pillow, someone else’s hair. He had been so sure it would feel unpleasant, but it didn’t. On the contrary. He lay on his back looking up at the ceiling. He searched his mind for her name, but it was still gone. Perhaps it was never said. Which would have been strange. He must have said his, he must have said, Jim, and shaken her hand and bowed to excess, which he tended to do in situations like this, with a double whisky in his belly, so why wouldn’t she have done the same, why would she not have said hello and then her name. He closed his eyes. The bar in Olavsgaard Hotel. The big hotel that looked like a palace in a Disney cartoon, placed at random on a deserted, windblown hilltop by the motorway at the edge of the town of Lillestrøm where one of the three rivers was moving past in a not so elegant fashion, half dead, on its way to the great lake. This town that had just risen from being no more than a big village to some higher status, and the hotel had a rather dubious reputation, at least the bar on the ground floor had, but this was the place you never left empty-handed, that was the saying, and it was there he met her the night before. He could well remember them leaving.
He was the wrong side of fifty, and yet for six months he had gone out at least twice a week, to restaurants and bars around this district and in Oslo, and entered and looked around thinking, where shall I sleep tonight, and most often he ended up in the house of a woman he had never seen or spoken to before, whose husband on this particular weekend or any other weekend was away, a lorry driver heading for Hamburg, a rig worker in the North Sea, or she was what you called single, not solitary, but single, and one time he came all the way out to a house in Høland, in the district of Hemnes, right in the south of it, and he was able to have a conversation with her the morning after, it was a major surprise, but he never saw her again, he couldn’t find the house, although he made a serious effort. It was just gone.