“God?”
Ulf said the word in a way that made it sound anesthetizingly dull.
“Not necessarily. But some force in nature, something large and powerful that our empiricism has not yet helped us to discover.” She almost had to run to keep up with him and her voice trembled. “Something we’ve perhaps avoided taking notice of, and preferred to put into a religious category?”
“Instead of what?”
“What that physicist was talking about.”
She had always been more persuasive, and sounded wiser, in writing than in speech. The discrepancy had long frustrated her and that frustration had been one of the factors that made her decide to be a writer when she was just twelve or thirteen years old. When she became a teacher, she prepared herself so thoroughly that the lessons mostly entailed reciting her own texts from memory.
Ulf stopped abruptly, looked quickly around, and then bent down to pull something off from where it grew on the side of a stone.
“Look at this!” he said, pointing to a tuft of moss.
“Where?”
“Just there.”
She looked closer. The tip of his index finger was indicating a pale, trumpet-shaped growth a little larger than the head of a pin.
“Look at its perfect shape!”
It reminded her of the rough horns of plenty that children used to draw in school for Thanksgiving.
“Cladonia fimbriata, or trumpet lichen. Belongs to the class of Lecanoromycetes. This is one of the wonders of nature. No need to look any further for wonderfulness. I can tell you exactly how it originated and why it grows in this habitat.”
“I don’t doubt that at all.”
Ulf threw the moss away. She had expected him to return it to the stone reverently, which would, one way or the other, have supported the point he had made.
Then he raised the binoculars that hung around his neck, placed his legs well apart, and started turning slowly.
“Musk oxen are harder to spot in the autumn when the heather has turned brown.”
She considered using her binoculars, too, but they were in the bottom of her rucksack.
“Because the musk oxen are brown as well,” Ulf added.
“I get it,” Jane said.
He was reaching the end of a panoramic scan carried out evenly and methodically, and didn’t seem bothered when the binoculars pointed straight at her face.
“Do you see anyone?” she asked.
“No one,” he said.
When they stopped the first night, Ulf walked down to a mountain stream that had carved a gully in the ground behind their campsite. A good-sized gully, but not deep enough to leave it in any doubt that he was naked. Afterward, he went over to her and stood in full view with a tiny, green microfiber towel as a loincloth. He was in great shape and almost certainly noticed that she noticed.
Jane started to pull the tent out of its bag.
“Is that a tattoo you’ve got there?” Jane asked.
Ulf came closer and contracted one pectoral muscle.
“It symbolizes freedom,” he said.
The tattoo showed an eye.
“It’s an eagle’s eye. I’ve always been interested in eagles.”
“Isn’t everyone?”
“But I figured having an entire eagle would be a little banal, so just the eye seemed like a better idea.”
“How’s one to know that it’s the eye of an eagle? Not the eye of a parakeet, say?”
“How does one know?” His eyebrows moved a little higher up. He drew a small circle on his chest muscle.
“You knew from the prominent shadow here, almost like an eyebrow.”
She leaned closer to him.
“Boo!” he shouted and pressed his chest against her face. “The eagle attacks!”
She had made up her mind to erect her tent, say that she was very tired, which happened to be true, too, and crawl into her sleeping bag at once. While Ulf got dressed, she dragged the inner and outer sheets, the tent pins, and an unlikely number of lengths of rod out of the olive-green tent bag. Naturally, there was no set of instructions. In Norway, anything to do with tents was supposed to be common knowledge.
While she struggled with the tent, she sensed Ulf observing her.
“Jane. About those books of yours?”
He was stirring a bagful of freeze-dried food. It was the first time he had shown any interest in her work—or, what had been her work.
“What kind of novels are they?”
“I don’t know what to say… just, novels.”
She hadn’t meant to sound curt but his question was one she had always found difficult to deal with. She stood still, a piece of tent rod in each hand, and thought about The Age of Plenitude. She had written it as if she still lived in the time before the September 11 attacks, before the economic crisis. While other writers had taken on board the seriousness of the times, she had carried on focusing on smaller causes and effects. But why shouldn’t she? Her world had not changed. She didn’t know many people who had lost their jobs, and no one who had died when the Twin Towers collapsed. Presumably, many readers had been in the same situation, since the book sold so well. But the sales could also reflect a need for escapism, something similar to the seventies pop tune “Happy Times” shooting to the top of the music charts in the middle of the grimmest recession since the Great Depression.
Besides, what she wrote was not easygoing or far from real life. She wrote about unrequited love, social anxiety, weariness. And she had tackled such themes again in her last manuscript. It was never completed. She had reached page 104 of the story about a woman who had a comfortable life with uncomplicated existential challenges until the all-powerful Author decided it was time for some high seriousness and an old, cold metal arm swung down from Heaven and flattened her under a period.
“I read mostly professional stuff,” Ulf said.
“Of course, that makes sense.”
She had managed to slot two equally long rods together.
“But when I read fiction, I like a good story. Preferably with new subjects to learn about. You know, like historical events. Do you write about historical events?”
“I don’t write anymore, you know that.”
“But when you did, was it about history?”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“What are your books about, then?”
She shrugged.
“A book must be about something, surely?”
“Must it? Can’t it be about lack of action? Like Seinfeld.”
“I don’t like Seinfeld.”
Yet another difference between them that, for a few long seconds, she allowed to grow into a huge, all-encompassing sense of loneliness.
“Are you sure you know what to do? Can I help?” he asked.
She had managed to insert several of the rods into place and had pulled the tent into an arch that looked completely unsafe.
“You concentrate on your tent and leave me to mine,” Jane said.
“My own tent?”
“That’s right.”
“I didn’t bring a tent. Now that we’ve got yours.”
The next day, fog was beginning to well up from the bottom of the valley. She trudged along behind Ulf again but the walking was tougher now. As the day wore on, it grew harder to share his enthusiasm about the many sightings of musk ox excrement. Maybe the tension that was growing between them had something to do with this. Her lack of interest in turds.
He walked with his chest thrust forward and his arms swinging vigorously, as if wading through deep water. Suddenly he exclaimed, “And then they come along and tell me that I won’t have access to the biodiversity labs. Top priority for phylogenetic systematology and evolution, if you please.”