I imagine my name won’t be on my gravestone either. It’s a pity, really, because I like my name better and better with every day that passes.
“Mathea Martinsen,” I said and held out my hand. The new neighbor proudly folded down the canopy of her baby carriage. “And this is little June,” his mother said, beaming at the father. “Oh,” I said, “a woman in today’s obituaries had the same name.”
“Did you notice they all have the same hair color?” I asked Epsilon afterwards. “Could be,” Epsilon said. “I really don’t think that’s necessary,” I said.
“Martin Martinsen,” I read in the telephone directory. “Mary,” “Mary,” “Mary,” when did Mary get to be so popular? “Mary” and “Mathea Martinsen” are both listed. My eyes begin to well up, because I’m really there after all, so why doesn’t anybody ever call? No one ever calls. What’s more, my name is listed twice, but the second one has the wrong address, so I can tell it isn’t me, and how can someone else be named Mathea Martinsen, I’m Mathea Martinsen. Or, maybe the other woman is the real Mathea Martinsen. That’s probably it. Still, I almost feel like I’m a part of the totality, as Schopenhauer described it, and after staring at the asterisk on the bottom left of the telephone, I’m finally able to dial my own number. Luckily, it’s busy. I’m a very busy person, “pressed for time” is my middle name.
I’ve taken an important step in life, and now I have to take one more. You can’t stay still because then you’ll go into hibernation and before you know it your life has slipped through your fingers. I need to call Information and ask for Mathea Martinsen in Haugerud, maybe Information keeps statistics as to the most requested and most loved person in the nation, a Top Ten Requested Numbers, and I shouldn’t just sit here moping around because my name isn’t on the list. I should do something about it.
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.”