“It’s working out quite well,” I said.
I could have told him about the kids and how maddening it was that they messed about with me and that the teachers were crazy. But I simply had no confidence that it would change anything. Bacon would not be fired if I said something. Bacon was not considered a problem. The system was fond of Bacon and pleased with him. The psychologist did not come to help me but to check on me. He was an emissary of the system and vigorously sucked at its teats.
“How’s the situation at home?”
I didn’t know what he meant, and he rephrased the question.
“What are conditions like in your home?”
How was I meant to answer that? Did I have to tell him about my dad? That it was crazy when he held fast to my hand and stroked me on the cheek as he whispered to me that I should promise him this and that? Would that change anything? Would Dad then get called to a school psychologist? Mom was fine, except perhaps when she was mad about something I had done. Other than that, she never got up to any nonsense. The doctors at Dalbraut had, for example, wanted to put me on some medication. Mom had forbidden it and said she would rather have me as I was than doped up on some drugs.
“I don’t know,” I said.
The psychologist thought about it and stroked his beard and read what was on the piece of paper. What was the piece of paper? Who had let him have it? I didn’t believe any teacher would write something about me. Maybe this was simply a blacklist of everything I had done. Was it perhaps the report the detectives took from me?
“How do you get along with your parents?”
What could I say? We were like three strangers living together in one room and speaking three different languages. Mom and Dad didn’t understand one another. Mom understood me a bit, but I didn’t understand them at all. We were each from a different planet.
“All right,” I muttered, to say something.
The psychologist looked at me and stroked his beard, nodded and muttered, distracted, like he’d accept anything I said. But I remained silent.
He stood up and walked over to the sink that was in the room. He told me to come over. He put the stopper in the sink, turned it on, and filled it up with water. We were both silent as the water flowed and I watched, curious.
“What’s this?” I asked when he turned off the tap.
He handed me a glass and a spoon and pushed the trash can toward me with his leg.
“So, Jón. How would you go about emptying the sink?” he asked, looking at me questioningly.
That was amusing. What did he want me to do? What was he really interested in? It would undeniably be funny to scoop water into the glass with the spoon and pour the glass into the trashcan, or scoop water with a spoon into the glass, then drink it and throw it up into the trashcan. It would also be funny to simply drink the water straight from the sink. I understood what was going on. He was testing to see if I was stupid. Okay, this was what you call an intelligence test. I was seized by a pressing need to do something weird and I really, really wanted to give him something he wasn’t expecting. What if I sucked up the water in my mouth, spit it into the glass, and poured it from the glass via the spoon into the trash can? And then drank it? But the therapist was so serious that I dared not clown about.
“Can’t I just take the stopper out?” I asked, carefully.
He looked searchingly at me and lifted his eyebrows like he was asking me whether I thought I was right. I was silent and looked down. He emptied the sink, sat back at his desk, and wrote something on a piece of paper. I stayed put and waited. If I could go now, I’d be able to go out and smoke before the main recess started and all the idiots came out of class. During the main recess I tended to sneak out the back door, go over into the garden opposite, and smoke there in order to get some peace. But it was fun to smoke with someone rather than alone. The only one who smoked outside the back door with me was Fat Dóri. He never got any respite from the bullying. And there were often some amusing kids outside smoking during classes. They were boys who were cutting or had been thrown out of class — like me.
The psychologist looked at me.
“Jón, where do elephants live?”
The question caught me by surprise. I had instead been expecting a question about what hobbies I had. I was entirely prepared to tell him all about anarchism. It had also occurred to me when I first saw him that he reminded me considerably of Peter Kropotkin. Perhaps they were related? Or perhaps he knew who Kropotkin was and was trying to imitate his appearance? I would also have been very happy to tell him about Crass and the difference between Crass and the Sex Pistols. In addition, I really wanted to tell him about all the Crass slogans, like “Jesus died for his own sins not mine,” and “Fight war not wars.” I was quite willing to discuss what they meant with him. Didn’t that mean you ought to fight against war but not in it? Or did it mean that one should fight in a particular war, not in all wars in general? I had not met anyone that I could talk to about this. But he didn’t want to talk about anarchism; he wanted to talk about elephants. I knew a lot about elephants. I had both watched a documentary about them and read about them in animal books. I thought elephants were charming animals. I owned a big book about animals published by Fjölva and there was a chapter about elephants I had often read. The Icelandic translation of elephant was úlfaldi because the word had been matched to the picture of a camel back in the old days. Someone had confused camel and elephant — the name camel had been put on the wrong animal. But I knew that it was “elephant” in English. There are two species of elephants, African and Asian. The African elephant is bigger than the Asian. I doubted, however, that the psychologist wanted such detailed explanations. He was just checking whether I was an idiot. It was asinine.
“Africa.”
I was hoping that would suffice. I couldn’t be bothered with this. I hoped that he wouldn’t ask anything else. He nodded his head like I’d guessed the correct answer in some quiz. But it wasn’t completely right because I had omitted the Asian elephant.
“But where do whales live?” he asked next.
I also knew a lot about whales. In the Fjölva big book of animals, there was a picture of orcas that had killed a blue whale that leapt out of the sea.
“The sea.”
He nodded and wrote something. Then he looked up and told me I could go.
“Thank you,” he said and hunkered down into his papers.
I was relieved. Fat Dóri was outside, standing in a corner and smoking. We had stopped meeting outside school. I bummed a cigarette and told him about the psychologist.
“He made you do the test with the sink?” Dóri asked.
“Yes?”
“Me too.”
I giggled. Dóri took a big drag from the cigarette then shot the stub into the air with a flick, down into a puddle.
“Fucking idiot!”
Mom was sitting in the kitchen when I got home. She looked at me strangely — something was up. There was something wrong. And when something was wrong, then it was always connected with me in some way. Usually it was something that I had done. On such occasions, Mom was sat at the kitchen table when I got home; she called to me and asked me to come and sit with her — or, rather, ordered me to.
“Would you come and sit here with me, Jón!”
Two crumpled cigarettes lay on the table. I knew immediately that they were my cigarettes. I’d been smoking since going to the country. I hid cigarette packages that I bought outside in the garden, but it still sometimes happened that I left them in my pocket. I tried to have a surprised expression like I didn’t understand what was going on and knew nothing about these cigarettes.