I’m finally listening to the dial tone, it reminds me of a hymn I learned in school, and then the doorbell rings. At first I think it’s Epsilon, but I know it won’t be him. I freeze and the doorbell rings again. I hang up the telephone and peek out the peephole. It’s not Epsilon. It’s June.
“I know you’re in there,” I hear him say.
How do you know that? I think.
“I see your eyeball in the peephole,” he says.
“Ditto,” I whisper back. I’ve actually wondered if it’s possible to peep through peepholes from the outside to see if anyone’s spying on you from the inside, since I like to pretend my neighbors watch what I do all day: “We need to keep our eye on the old woman on the third floor, that way when she dies she won’t start to stink, just imagine, the smell might seep into the walls, that would affect the value of the whole building,” and I’ve tried to see if I could make out their pupils in their own peepholes as I pass by, but I’ve never been able to settle the matter one way or the other. It’s impossible to conduct the experiment on your own door all by yourself, I’ve tried.
“Having trouble deciding to open up?” June asks when I open the door.
“No,” I say, “I was on the telephone.”
“I see,” he says, as though he doesn’t believe me. “Well, can I borrow some sugar?”
Before I have time to answer, he hands me a cup that reads “Oslo.” I take it and head for the kitchen. Luckily, I still have some sugar left from the baking I did for the community gathering, otherwise I would’ve had to get to the store without June noticing, it would be too embarrassing to admit I didn’t have any sugar, everyone has sugar. I fill the cup and when I come out of the kitchen there’s a surprise waiting for me, because he’s standing there in the living room. A human being is actually standing on our carpet. I don’t know what I should say or do, but after a little consideration, I say “here you go” and hand him the cup. He takes it without looking at me. I expect him to thank me and leave, but instead he asks me if I have a problem with moisture in the walls.
“We’ve never had a problem with moisture,” he continues. “But then again, you never know. What about your bathroom, do you have problems with moisture there?”
He’s looking at me now and surely he expects an answer.
“Sometimes I shower,” I say. “But usually I just splash a little water on my armpits.” It’s surprisingly easy to talk, probably because I know I’m his intellectual superior.
He looks at me without understanding. Then he turns his attention to the living-room walls. He raps them with his knuckles. After that, he runs his hand back and forth over the wallpaper before climbing on the chair that stands next to the sideboard. Then he takes some masking tape from his back pocket and begins to run it along the molding, he can manage a meter and a half before he has to move the chair again, and it’s like that the whole way around the room. He takes all the pictures off the wall and leans them against the coffee table, and then he takes out a paintbrush. He spackles over the fork marks. Then he rips up the carpet and lays parquet. He tosses Epsilon’s chair and my TV into a skip he’s rented, it’s standing outside the building and every time some neighbor sees the chance to get rid of some ratty bamboo blinds or an old beat-up sofa, he gets mad and tells them to rent their own dumpster. Soon there’s not a millimeter of my and Epsilon’s life left, it’s only June and his things and his smell and his friends, he tells them how terrible the place used to look, and his mother, she brings him dinner every day at five o’clock, even Sundays, and takes his dirty clothes down as soon as the laundry room is free.
He’s inspecting the living room up and down and back and forth. “If we were to tear down the wall between our apartments, we’d have the biggest king-size apartment in all of Haugerud,” he says and laughs.
I laugh softly too, so it won’t get awkward. When you’re as old as me, you should know better than to laugh with idiots just to be polite, but I don’t know any better, I’m almost a hundred, just a stone’s throw away, but acting like I was born yesterday. That sort of rhymes.
June turns and leaves the apartment without saying good-bye, his head filled with decorating ideas.
I watch TV for a long time without really looking at it, all I can think about are his hands on my wallpaper and his feet on my carpet and his laughing, but then the news begins and maybe Einar Lunde will say something comforting. It’s nice to know that everything could be much worse, I could’ve been blown to pieces by a bomb, but instead I’m just old and incontinent, and I just have that bladder problem when I laugh, which I don’t really remember how to do anymore. But instead of Einar Lunde, Jon Gelius is tonight’s news anchor. That’s a disappointment, I thought he’d been fired. I’m still hoping he’ll cheer me up, but then he starts talking about the first warm day in China. They flash pictures of a beach, there must be a hundred thousand Chinese people there and they’re so packed in that only about half of them can lie on the sand. It’s obviously meant to be a happy story, because Jon Gelius is smiling with his eyes. However, it just gives me the feeling that we’re all so insignificant in the grand scheme of things, I could’ve been a Chinese person on the beach. We’re all Chinese people now, or do I mean we’re all Social Democrats? I remember reading somewhere that the total number of people alive on earth today is greater than the total number of people who have died throughout all time, and I wonder when the opposite will be true, when there will be more dead people than living, because if that were the case, then at least I could be helping to tip the scale in favor of the dead. It would be nice to make a difference. As it stands, though, being dead is more special than being alive, and I’ve sometimes thought that plenty of people get more attention after death than they ever did when they were living. Although in my case, it’ll probably be about equal.
I remember when Epsilon’s attention was completely focused on the woman in the glittering leotard hanging from a long rope. I have no idea how he’d talked me into going to the circus. I must’ve been intoxicated. The woman climbed and twirled up and down, up and down. It was nothing compared to what I could do on a bar. Epsilon’s ears were flapping my way as usual, so it was easy for him to hear what I said. “Do you smell that stench?” I whispered. “It’s the animals,” Epsilon whispered back. But as I watched the woman in the leotard, I formed my own opinions. She gyrated on and on, it couldn’t possibly have gotten more boring. But then it did. Finally, she did a couple of twirls and landed on the floor. Just to be polite, I gasped.
Today isn’t going to get any better. You’ve had a really bad day, Mathea, so aren’t you grateful you don’t have many days left, I tell myself—you were patient in life, now rest from strife—but then I think of the sound of the humming dial tone, why do I have to be so optimistic by nature, why can’t I just lay myself down and die?
~ ~ ~
“THE CHANCES OF BEING STRUCK by lightning twice in the same spot are less than ε, if ε equals a microscopically small quantity” was the first thing Epsilon said to me. “It’s completely unbelievable.” He didn’t know how truly unbelievable it was, because nothing had ever singled me out. The spun bottle never pointed at me, the neighborhood kids never found me when we played hide-and-seek, and I never found the almond in the pudding at Christmas, one or the other of my parents always found it, which was almost a bit suspicious.