Farther along we’ll know more about it...
Harry had heard the slow version of the gospel song before. The violins...
Farther along we’ll understand why.
The front of the truck was growing larger. Three... two...
Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine.
So completely right. So completely... wrong. Harry wrenched the wheel hard to the right.
The Ford Escort veered back onto its own side of the road, only just missing the left-hand corner of the front of the truck. Harry was heading straight towards the crash barriers and braked, turning the wheel sharply to the left. He felt the tires lose their grip, the back of the car slide right, and felt the centrifugal force push him into his seat as the car spun round, aware that this couldn’t possibly end well. He had time to see the truck disappear ahead of him, it was already a long way away, before the back of the car hit the crash barrier and he became weightless. Blue sky, light. For a moment he thought he was dead, that it was like they said: that you left your body and rose up towards paradise. But the paradise he was heading towards was spinning, as were the forest-covered hillside, the road and the river, while the sun was going up and down like a time-lapse film about the seasons, to the accompaniment of a voice that, in the sudden, strange silence, sang “We’ll understand it all...” before it was interrupted by another crash.
Harry was pushed back into his seat, looked at the sky above him, which had stopped spinning, but now it seemed to be dissolving, taking on a greenish hue before a pale, transparent curtain was pulled across it. It was getting darker, they were sinking, down, underground. It’s hardly that surprising, he found himself thinking, that I’m heading to hell instead. Then he heard a muffled thud, like the door of an air-raid shelter closing. The car straightened out, then slowly turned around, and he realised what had happened. The car had landed in the river, rear end first, had gone through the ice, and now he was underneath it. It was like landing on an alien planet with a strange, green landscape lit up by rays of sunlight filtered through ice and water, where everything that wasn’t rock or the rotting remains of trees swayed dreamily as if dancing to the music.
The current had caught hold of the car, and it floated slowly down the river like a hovercraft as it rose gently to the surface. There was a scraping sound as the roof hit the ice. Water was pouring in from the bottom of the car doors, so cold that it numbed Harry’s feet. He undid the seat belt and tried to shove the door open. But the water pressure just one metre below the surface made it impossible. He’d have to get out through the window. The radio and the headlights were still working, so the water hadn’t yet short-circuited the electrics. He pressed the button to open the window, but nothing happened. A short circuit, or the water pressure. The water had risen to his knees. The roof of the car was no longer scraping against the ice, the car had stopped rising, he was floating between the bottom and the surface of the river. He would have to kick the front windshield out. He leaned back in his seat, but there wasn’t enough room, his legs were too long, and he could feel the alcohol making his movements sluggish, his thoughts slow, his coordination clumsy. His hand fumbled under the seat and found the lever to push it backwards. Above it another lever, and he lowered the back of the seat until he was almost lying down. A fragment of memory. From when he had last adjusted the seat. At least now he could pull his legs out from beneath him. The water had almost reached his chest now, the cold clutching at his lungs and heart like a claw. Just as he was about to kick both feet against the windshield, the car hit something and he lost his balance, fell towards the passenger seat and his kick struck the steering wheel instead. Fuck, fuck! Harry saw the rock he had collided with glide past as the car spun around in a slow waltz before it carried on, backwards, hit another rock and turned the right way around again. The song fell silent in the middle of another “We’ll understand it all...” Harry took a deep breath up by the roof, then ducked under to get in position to kick again. This time he hit the windshield, but he was surrounded by water now and he felt his feet hit the glass as gently and devoid of force as an astronaut’s boots on the moon.
He crawled up onto the seat, had to press his head against the roof to get to the air. He inhaled deeply a couple of times. The car stopped. Harry ducked under again and saw through the windshield that the Escort had caught on the branches of a rotten tree. A blue dress with white dots was waving at him. Panic seized him. Harry beat his hand against the side window, tried to shove it open. In vain. Suddenly two of the branches snapped off and the car slid sideways and came loose. The light from the headlamps, which, bizarrely, were still working, swept across the bottom of the river, towards the shore, where he saw a flicker of something that could have been a beer bottle, something made of glass, anyway, before the car drifted on, faster now. He needed more air. But the car was now so full of water that Harry had to close his mouth and press his nose against the car roof, and breathe in through his nostrils. The headlights went out. Something drifted into his field of vision, rocking on the surface of the water. The Jim Beam bottle, empty, with its lid on. As if it wanted to remind him of a trick that had saved him once before, a long time ago. But that wouldn’t make any difference now; the air in the bottle would only give him a few more seconds of painful hope after resignation had granted him a little peace.
Harry closed his eyes. And — just like the cliché — his life passed before his eyes.
The time when he got lost as a boy, and ran around the forest in terror just a couple of stones’ throws from his grandfather’s farm in Romsdalen. His first girlfriend, in her parents’ bed with the house to themselves, the balcony door open, the curtain swaying, letting in the sun as she whispered that he had to look after her. And him whispering “yes,” then reading her suicide note six months later. The murder case in Sydney, the sun off to the north, meaning that he got lost there as well. The one-armed girl who plunged into the pool in Bangkok, her body cutting through the water like a knife, the peculiar beauty of asymmetry and destruction. A long hike in Nordmarka, just Oleg, Rakel and him. Autumn sun falling on Rakel’s face, smiling at the camera as they waited for the timer, Rakel noticing him looking at her, turning towards him, her smile growing even wider, reaching her eyes, until the light evens out and she’s the one shining like the sun, and they can’t take their eyes off each other and have to take the picture again.
Evens out.
Harry opened his eyes again.
The water hadn’t risen any higher.
The pressure had finally evened out. The basic, complex laws of physics were permitting this strip of air to remain beneath the roof and the surface of the water, for the time being.
And there was — literally — light at the end of the tunnel.
Through the rear window, back where they had come from, what he saw had been coloured an increasingly dark green, but in front of him it was getting lighter. That had to mean that the river up ahead was no longer covered in ice, or was at least shallower, possibly both. And if the pressure had evened out, he should be able to open the car door. Harry was about to duck under and try when he realised he was still under the ice. That it would be a ridiculous way to drown, seeing as here in the car he had enough air to last until they reached what was hopefully a shallow section of the river, free from ice. And it wasn’t far away now, they seemed to be drifting faster, and the light was getting brighter.