“You can change your ticket. Take a later flight and go via Oslo. You’re going to Russia, and you’re going to set up a cooperation agreement. Simple as that.”
Even Bj?rnar shook his head at me, but that was because he was laughing, in a way I hadn’t seen him laugh for a long time. It gave me hope. Maybe I should go to Russia, if for nothing else than at least getting some good stories out of it, stories that could save my marriage, even though I had plunged us into financial ruin.
“But I’m scared of ending up in one of those little cages they have in their courtrooms.”
“You’re scared of a lot of things,” he said. “If you go to Russia, you might actually get so scared that your fear flips and reverses direction.”
“You mean, like, it might ease up some?”
“Maybe.”
I lay in bed and mulled that over. The thought of going to Russia caused an iron fist to squeeze my heart like never before, and my scalp itched so much I was sure I must have lice. But at the same time Bj?rnar had put an idea in my head. Maybe this was a good thing? Maybe I just needed to be more scared than I’d ever been before. Maybe that would help me develop some kind of superpower.
18
I tried my all-out best to avoid Frank, who I knew must be awfully disappointed about losing his chance to internationalize, but the day before I left he succeeded in tracking me down.
“You weaseled your way onto the committee,” he said resentfully.
“I didn’t weasel my way onto anything. I—”
“No one knows as much about bilateral cooperation as I do. No one!”
“That’s probably debatable, but the point is that I don’t even want to go. But I have to. In part because of this whole bad-cop strategy that—”
He interrupted me by holding one finger up right in front of my nose and glaring at me.
“You see this?”
“Yes.”
“Does it stink?”
“Not particularly.”
“That’s weird, because I think something smells fishy here, very fishy!”
I sighed.
“Look, I wish you could go in my place, but it’s not up to me. And if you’re going to blame anyone, you should be looking at Peter and Ingvill. They’re the ones who started this whole bad-cop strategy. You know that, right?”
“VERY FISHY,” Frank roared into my face, then spun around and marched down the hallway.
“So I’m going,” I told Bj?rnar that same evening.
“Yes, I’m aware of that.”
We stood there, surrounded by cardboard boxes.
Not that we ever talked about them. We’d stopped talking about anything that had to do with houses or our home life. Which is why neither of us mentioned that I would be coming back shortly before our move.
Even though we were nowhere near selling the current house.
Even though neither of us remembered why we’d even wanted to move or why we’d gone and bought that enormous old house that we’d only been inside once and could hardly remember in the first place.
Not to mention that lately I’d started realizing that most of the families in Astrid Lindgren’s books weren’t actually all that happy. I mean, come to think of it, you really only found those wonderful Christmases in the books set on Troublemaker Street and in Noisy Village. Other than that she mostly wrote about kids who were parentless. Or their mothers were working themselves to death and their fathers were alcoholics.
So I was a little puzzled about what I’d actually been thinking.
Meanwhile I was going to Russia.
“Bye,” I said, waiting for some kind of well wishes from Bj?rnar or maybe something I could draw strength from.
“Bye,” he said.
I swallowed the lump in my throat and walked into a different darkness.
A Tehomic darkness I would descend down into and maybe learn how to manage. Deep, deep down.
But there was one bright spot. Since I’d changed my tickets so late, I also had to upgrade to first class. And first class meant one thing: champagne.
Not to celebrate, I told myself. But because I can. So chill out, Tehom!
I practiced my drink order several times to myself, but ended up hoodwinked by the man next to me.
“Coffee and a macaroon, thanks,” he said.
“Coffee and a macaroon, thanks,” I repeated.
A macaroon? I didn’t even like those. Not to mention that obviously an airplane macaroon wouldn’t even be a normal macaroon but something goopy and soggy, like congealed palm oil.
Still, things went really well for a while. The coffee was nice and hot. I had a book to read. There was no turbulence.
Then things started going downhill. First, it turned out to be the wrong book. A child is sent to loveless foster parents in Wales while his parents end up in a concentration camp? My tears were dripping into my coffee cup and all over the pages of the book, and I started to notice the trembling in my head again.
I inhaled quickly and realized the palm oil nugget had settled in my stomach like a lump. I had to get off this plane—now!
I looked at my watch, which showed that there were almost two hours left until we arrived in Saint Petersburg.
I tried to pull myself together, but my mind went blank.
What was happening to me?
I had always had these sorts of tendencies.
But I’d also always had some degree of control over them. When the anxiety was there, it was usually more like a hum, kind of like unliberated negative potential.
Not this time.
I wondered if maybe this was the turning point. People who are crazy haven’t always been crazy. They didn’t need to be institutionalized their whole lives. But eventually you snap.
And become psychotic.
I felt the iron fist tighten, and looked down at my thighs.
I couldn’t be on this plane anymore.
It was untenable.
What if I never got out?
This seat.
The curtains separating us from the common masses in economy class.
The little window.
The clouds outside.
The iron fist.
I considered looking for Peter and Ingvill. I hadn’t seen them, but knew they were aboard somewhere. I quickly pushed that thought aside. They would probably just make everything worse.
I looked over at the macaroon man next to me.