“But you mustn’t forget yourself.”
That, too, was a fine thing to say.
It made her think of their first day up the mountain, when they had crossed a sunken area where the low, sage-like shrubs grew so densely that their leaves formed a smooth surface of matte silver. Ulf was up to his waist after taking just one step off the path. She stood still and followed him with her eyes as he moved about through the undergrowth like an animal. The sun was warming the moisture on the leaves, creating a sphere of whispering light around him. He clambered back onto the path, sniffing at something he held in his hand and then handed over to her. It was a tuft of wool, light and soft. She could just sense its presence on the palm of her hand. Three or four black hairs were mixed with the wool. The hairs were so thick she could roll them between her thumb and index finger.
“Guard hairs,” Ulf told her. “The white down is the inner layer. Musk oxen let the shrubs pull some of it off in the spring so they don’t die of overheating in the summer. Isn’t that great?”
His eyes had been shining with naked, childish enthusiasm but she had just shrugged.
Ulf drank a last slug of whisky and started to look around the tent.
“I guess we’d better have something to eat,” he said.
She slowly raised her hand, placed it on his. She had a vision of disappearing into somewhere strange, to force a feeling to emerge, a sensation powerful enough to put a damper on all others. Like self-harm. He turned her hand over, squeezed it, began to stroke her palm with his index finger.
When Jane had decided to screw Ray Dechamps for the first time, they had been in the basement room in his parents’ place and David Lee Roth, played at max volume, was coming through from upstairs where Ray’s brother was partying with his friends. It had dawned on her just how tricky it would be to do this with her critical mind engaged, rather than abandoning all thought and clawing Ray’s back while he banged away for roughly as long as the guitar solo.
Afterward, when they were lying together on top of the sleeping bags in the dense darkness, Ulf’s breathing sounded exaggerated, too heavy, as if after some sporting feat. She was cold but her clothes had ended up on the far side of Ulf. She felt like an envelope that had once contained an important document but had been reused for some other, insignificant purpose.
Ulf turned over and put his arm on her breasts. As she was lying on her back they had flattened, so he had to grapple to get a good handful.
“How was it for you?”
Oh, Christ.
She sat up but his hand followed her like an animal looking for warmth, and she had to lift it away before bending over him to grab her clothes.
Ulf fired up the Primus stove. The heat intensified the smell of armpits and damp wool. Streaks of rainwater ran down the outside of the tent like oil in a greasy frying pan. They sat in silence at opposite ends of the tent and ate freeze-dried curried stew. Then Ulf broke the silence. As if time had stood still inside his head, he followed up what they had talked about the day before:
“That great, superior entity of yours? Or is it a place? Is it where souls go?”
She had been considering if she shouldn’t tell him that she was done with this trip, and would prefer to back out. But it felt like admitting defeat.
“The physicist deliberately didn’t use the word soul. He only spoke of awareness.”
“Smart,” Ulf remarked.
She so did not need to speak about that TED Talk. Not anymore. She was angry with herself for mentioning it. Tom Belotti had sent her the link and she had been watching the lecture over and over again for three days. Tom had meant well. And he was the one who had found her. The door had been left open and two stove burners left on. His first thought was that she had killed herself. When he discovered her sitting in the study in front of the screen, his fear turned to rage that made his neck flare red. But he had taken her broken soul home with him to his kitchen and tried to patch her up with Vladlena’s help.
When she told them that she planned to go to Norway, Vladlena had said something in Russian.
“What did she say, Tom?”
And Tom had replied, with a sigh, “That you remind her of an animal that leaves the herd in order to die alone.”
Vladlena had punched him on the shoulder.
“But that is what you said!”
“Yes. Not go, Jane,” Vladlena told her.
“Listen, this guy surely thought the point was that it should be possible to meet those you loved and missed in some form or another? That in the greater whole, you can meet again?” Ulf asked.
“I recommend you listen to his lecture,” Jane said.
“Sorry. But that thought has nothing to offer except false reassurance.”
To refute the idea seemed to mean something positive to Ulf.
“I think you should consider a different line of thought, Jane. To think that your sense of loss can be understood as nothing more or less—like everything else—than atoms and molecules. Electrochemical signals, endlessly fired off.”
Ulf moved and knelt in front of the stove to shut the gas feed off. The wheezing ended and the tent filled with a stillness that laid everything to waste.
She didn’t know what made her continue. “It’s the last mystery for science.”
“What is?”
“Life and death.”
“What, have you found stuff online about that, too?”
He folded the gas stove’s supports before putting it away in a small container. Then Ulf got his evening routine underway: he lay down on his back and began pulling off one woolen sock. She clenched her jaw. His thigh was level with her eyes.
“We have a pretty good idea of what life is,” he said with a slight effort.
Then he straightened out again, placed the first sock on his chest, and folded it slowly and methodically.
“We can introduce an electric current into a mixture of appropriate chemicals and create elements of organic life.”
He groaned as he reached for his other foot. Possibly, this was to impress her by showing that he could get his socks off.
She longed for Greg as someone who is suffocating longs for air.
Ulf took out his nasal spray and shot a dose up first one nostril, then the other.
“And we can end the process in an analogous way,” he said through a rather blocked nose. “Mass doesn’t disappear after death. And there is no evidence for consciousness being anything other than the sum of neural functions that shape our perceptions of the world.”
“Fuck you.”
“The thing is…” He was pointing at her with the nasal spray. “You people believe that we’re after something when we tell you these things. But the facts we uncover are in no way charged with meaning. Not by us, anyway. They are just facts.”
She wondered about Ulf’s motives. Was he trying to toughen her up by telling her harsh truths? Or was he furious because his penis hadn’t taken her straight into seventh heaven? She turned away from him and pulled the sleeping bag over the back of her head.
“I simply tell you the way things are. All you can do, Jane…”
In the moment he placed his hand where her shoulder was under the sleeping bag, she knew what he would say and realized that her reaction would be impossible to control.
“… is let time do its healing work.”
“Go to hell.” The words came out in a low growl, as if from deep down a hole in the ground. “Go to hell!” She was shaking inside the sleeping bag. “I hate you. I hate you and your simpleminded cod philosophy and your crummy social skills and your shrunken little dick.” That last bit came out in a shrieking wail. Then she collapsed on the sleeping mat, her muscles contracting twitchily and her tongue growing thick inside her mouth.