The Best Book in the World

CHAPTER 37

Party Prison


Titus blinks slowly when he tries to follow the course of the smoke ring on its way to the bunker ceiling. The ceiling is completely soft and slowly whirling around the cable that the light bulb is hanging in. Unpleasant. He turns his gaze away, looks down instead.

With clumsy fingers he squeezes the cigarette butt between the back of his thumb and the top of his index finger. With a comparatively nimble flick of his finger he sends the fag-end flying towards a large pool of cognac that he has spilt in the middle of the floor. When it lands there is a swoosh and a crackling and the pool burns up.

‘Haha, what a suuuuperb floor flambé. Nice consissstency, without a doubt. Haha…’

Titus tries to roar with laughter.

‘HAHA! Hahahaha! Haha…’

He can’t get it right.

In a hoarse and leisurely voice he tries to talk himself into action again.

‘Give me a P – P, give me an A – A, give me an aaaaR – aaaaR, give me a T – T, give me a Y – Y, and give me a P – P, give me an aaaaR – aaaaR, give me an I – I, give me an S – S, give me an O – O, give me an N – N. And what do you get: Paaarty prison. I can’t hear you – wha’d’ya get? PaaaaRTY PRISON! Make an effort now, one more time…’

Jesus, what a f*cking boring earth dugout.

He has tried everything. He has sung all the drinking songs he can remember. He has told all the jokes he can recall. He has roared and yelled, pulled all the funny faces and laughed. He is one hell of a party animal, one in a million.

But now he can’t get it together.

He reels like an old heavyweight boxer that some greedy promoter has managed to resuscitate a final time with the promise of regaining his honour – if only he will allow himself to be knocked about just once more. But this vegetable has stopped defending himself years ago. He’s taken knocks in many long rounds without so much as lifting his hand in defence.

Now all that remains is that final fall to the floor like a lump of lead. With his hands hanging loosely by his sides and with his nose as the bow door, Titus slops off the chair and down onto the floor.


Titus Jensen has gone quiet. Silence reigns now.

Dark red blood runs out of both nostrils and mixes with the dark earth colour of the floor.

A couple of minutes – that could just as well have been a couple of hours – pass.

The bundle on the floor moves.

He rolls onto his right hand side and first opens half of his left eye. Looks around. A half-empty bottle lies an arm’s distance from him. With a final effort he stretches his left hand after it, gets hold of it and, with a shaky hand and considerable effort, manoeuvres it towards his mouth. He frees his right hand, which he has been lying on top of, and helps his left hand to get the bottle into his mouth. With their joint resources, the two hands manage to stick the neck of the bottle into Titus’ throat. No more vomiting reflex; it’s a long time since his muscles have tried to do battle. He hyperventilates through his nose since his mouth and throat are full of the bottle.

Then he turns on his back. The bottle sticks right up out of his mouth. A cross on a grave.

The contents gurgle slowly down his throat, into his stomach, bowels, lungs, blood, brain.

Gulp. Gulp. Gulp.

Active euthanasia. A suicide attempt. Help to self-help.

The hours are like minutes, which could be seconds.

He doesn’t have a body any longer. Yet his back seems to be pushed against the ceiling. As if he had turned gravity upside down and was lying there resting on the ceiling. He can see himself lying down there on the cellar floor. Bloody and very much the worse for wear. But still with some respect, despite the cross in his mouth.

Still.

Not moving a muscle.

Not taking a breath.

A black iris circle closes in around the picture of the body on the floor. In the middle, the light gets all the stronger. The body gets slowly smaller and smaller and is mixed up with the white light. The white circle gradually disappears like the opening in the tunnel behind an underground train.

Titus feels the calm spread through his soul, the same almost euphoric calm that he has often experienced when he been sitting and writing this summer. He thinks about his old desk of mahogany, of the little airing window on the left beyond the computer screen which lets in the slight murmur from the city traffic and filters the chirping from the small birds in the trees outside.

He thinks of all the words that he has become friends with and all the favourite phrases he has tickled under the chin. How the work has made him realise that it is precisely work that separates him from decay and addiction.

Now, the white circle is only a little dot in the black tunnel. The last star in the universe is about to fade forever.

He found what he had been looking for.

A brief moment of balance between fortune and misfortune.

A short life.

His life.

He must settle for that.

Or not.

With a roar, Titus lifts up the upper part of his body. At an angle of 90 degrees he sits on the floor and stares straight ahead. Blurred, dizzy.

He challenges his reflexes a last time and forces almost all of his hand into his mouth. He manages to get his fingers part of the way down his throat. He wiggles his index finger. It works. His throat starts to twitch with muscle spasms.

Now.

It’s happening now.

He vomits and vomits. Unbelievable amounts of putrid matter pour out of him. He sobs uncontrollably and the tears spray out of his eyes. The blood vessels on his eyelids rupture from the effort when the muscle contractions strike like lightning through his body. The small dots form a red eye shadow.

He wipes his mouth with the arm of his jacket and quakes from the effort when he laboriously clambers back up onto the chair. He puts his hands on the table top and stretches out his fingers. They have saved his life, yet again. They are dirty. They are trembling. But they are alive.

He straightens his back.

He sits in his writing pose. He is not going to abandon that one more time. Now he must empty himself of what is bad so that he will be able to empty himself of something good. He looks at his fingers. They have work to do.

Now.

Now is the turning point.