Authors: Berit Ellingsen
“How lucky we found you,” someone said nearby. A face he recognized as one of his neighbors was looking down at him, together with several others. He searched for Eloise and Mark, but they were not there.
“And lucky we hadn’t started manuring the fields yet,” another neighbor said and laughed.
“WE SAW A LARGE FLOCK OF SPARROWS BANK IN the air and had to go see what it was,” the neighbor closest to him said, whose name he couldn’t recall.
“You thought it might be someone trying to beat us to the sowing,” another one said.
“Shush,” the first neighbor replied.
“When we got closer the birds took to the air and then we saw you on the ground.”
“We thought you were dead!”
“Shhh!”
He looked at them. “Thank you for the help,” he said.
“Are you all right? Do you need help to get inside?”
“No,” he said. “I need to rinse off first.”
“You probably shouldn’t lie on the ground this time of year, it’s too cold.”
“And definitely not after we’ve sown or when the crops have started to grow!”
They helped him up, said goodbye, then retreated to the path that wound past the cabin and down to Mark and Eloise’s farm. Now he saw they were all wearing tall rubber boots and
fluorescent-colored vests, and that one of them had what in the moonlit darkness looked like the barrel of a shotgun hanging over her arm. The neighbors mounted two four-wheeled motorbikes and drove off in a spray of sludge and soil and noise, leaving a deep hush behind them.
He stood, switched on the six-sided glass lantern in the corner of the deck’s railing. The solar-powered light flickered a little, then cast a weak yet steady shine over the mud-dappled planks. Almost immediately the flitting shadows of mosquitoes and other flying insects appeared in the corona from the lamp.
He was shivering so hard it was difficult to stand upright and he had to clench his jaws to keep them from clattering. He peered down his torso, passed his quivering hands over his ears and neck and throat, and stretched his tensed limbs to look for ticks and other pests that may have attached themselves from the soil. From his memory the scent of sand and sun lotion appeared, from days on the beach by the artificial lake in the city when he ignored his mother’s calls from the shore, staying in the water until his lips were purple and his body shook.
He smiled at the recollection, shuffled over to the tap on the wall and pushed one end of the rubber hose that lay coiled beneath it onto the spigot. Then he attached the other end to the shower head that hung on a hook high above the tap. When he stepped into the spray the water was so cold it made him gasp and intensified his shivering. He rinsed his hair and skin as well as the shaking allowed, turned the faucet off, and hurried inside, leaving his muddied trainers, running pants, and underwear like shed skin on the deck.
He was shaking too hard to light the firewood in the hearth. Instead he pulled all his clothes out of the backpack until he found the beach towel he had brought from the city. When his skin was dry and his hair dripping less, he wrapped the metal foil emergency blanket from his first aid kit around himself and
curled up in the sleeping bag, pulling its broad top over his head. There, he shivered for hours until he fell asleep without noticing.
The next morning he went outside in the cold sunlight to rinse the clothes on the deck in the improvised shower and hang them to dry over the banister. Inside he rolled the clothes he had pulled out up again and stuffed them into the backpack. Then he found Eloise and Mark’s phone number in the project folder and invited them over.
This time, when Mark and Eloise arrived with the other neighbors and squashed together on the sofa, he had clean cups and teaspoons, hot tea, and a bowl with lumps of refined sugar waiting for them.
“I thought you only fertilized in the spring,” he said when the small talk was out of the way.
“Usually,” Eloise said. “But the soil is so virgin we thought we’d give it a boost by fertilizing it lightly and turn it once more before the frost, to prepare it for the spring.”
“You must till the land again then?” he said.
“Yes,” Mark said, “because there’s always frost in the winter, even if it doesn’t snow.”
“Does it snow much here?”
“Lots, or it used to. Now we’re lucky if we have a week of white in the winter.”
“It’s made the animals confused, bears come out of their dens in January and butterflies start swarming in March. The rabbits have almost disappeared because their white coat now gives them away instead of camouflaging them.”
“You snared several mottled rabbits last December, didn’t you?”
The neighbor who had done this nodded. “They looked like they didn’t know whether it was winter or spring.”
“Do you really think wheat will grow here?” he said. “At this latitude and elevation?”
The tea cups clinked, lowered almost simultaneously.
“Haven’t you read the papers?” Eloise said. “We had meteorologists at the local university compare the temperatures of the past decades with the newest projections from climate scientists and plant experts, proper research, mind you. We even received a grant from the ministry for agriculture as a special project.”
So that’s where the funding for the seeds and the fertilizer and the four-wheeled motorbikes came from. He looked at them. “And you also made personal investments into this?”
“Where did you hear that?”
“It’s a small town,” he lied. It was worth a try, there had to be lots of gossip around about the project.
Mark nodded. “Most of us have put our savings into it, we refinanced our farm. We’ll be all right.”
“Well worth the labor to get away from lumber and wood pulp production if you ask me,” Eloise said. “Those are no longer viable.”
“No pain, no gain?” he said.
“No risk, no gain,” Eloise replied. “Those who are not too risk adverse may find the changes in weather profitable and opening up new possibilities. And why not, it’s our moor, our land.”
He nodded and looked down into his tea. “But what if the weather changes again?”
“How? And to what?” Eloise nearly yelled.
HE DREAMED HE WAS GIVEN A KNIFE FROM HIS father’s country, a traditionally crafted dagger with the short handle wrapped tightly in ordered loops of black cotton, the bronze silhouette of a dragon spiraling among clouds secured inside it. The knife’s guard was a thin disc of steel with an intricate, curling pattern of negative space.
He took the knife with his right hand, held it horizontally, and with the left hand pulled back the lacquered wooden sheath. The steel in the single-edged blade had tiny particles that sparkled like sunlight on snow, or the galaxy clusters in the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, so luminous he had to squint against them, even inside the dream.
At first, he was enthralled by the beauty of the knife and the ancient craftsmanship with which it had been made, but then he realized it had been made for killing, to assassinate someone specific, and that knowledge hit him like a punch to the gut.
He woke up regretting what he had done the past months, getting involved with Kaye, killing the owl, leaving Michael and his family, buying the cabin, being pulled into the neighbors’ agrarian project. The remorse sat like lead in his bones. Other
thoughts rushed past like water around a boulder in a river. He was anchored by regret, everything else was fluid.
In his inbox was a note from the space organization. His application to the astronaut training program had made it out of the initial round and the organization required more information and tests. Attached to the mail was the medical form for a private piloting license, necessary for the second round of selection. He needed a physician to do a general examination and the electrocardiogram test that was required for the certificate, plus sign the form which asked if he had any kind of heart or circulatory disease, high blood pressure, asthma, diabetes, and a whole list of other ailments. Previous pilot or scuba diving licenses could be submitted instead, provided they had not been issued more than two years in the past, making his scuba diving license too old to use. He had to find a local physician who would see him and sign the license as soon as possible, otherwise he would have to find a doctor in the city and take the train back. When he realized he might have to return home, he almost grabbed his backpack to start on the hike to the concrete platform where the rail tracks reached into the pine forest in both directions.
Instead, he got up on legs that were asleep from sitting on the floor for too long, limped to the firewood he had stacked in the now completed northwestern corner of the living room and brought two of the logs and a twig with him to the hearth. He placed the logs on the ashes, fetched the lighter from the top drawer in the kitchen, and lit the twig, let it burn a little, before he put the flame to the logs so they caught fire too. The new warmth made him shiver and he moved as close to the hearth as possible and stared into the flames for a long while.
As he had suspected, none of the local physicians listed online were authorized to sign the medical test that the space organization required.
“The closest person who can issue certificates is on the coast,”
they informed him when he called the doctors’ offices, giving him the name of a small town two stops closer on the rail line than his home city. He’d save little more than an hour’s travel by going there. But since he didn’t trust himself to not give everything up and flee back to Michael and the apartment once he was home, he decided to go to the coast instead. He found the doctor the local physicians had mentioned online, phoned her office, and scheduled an appointment later in the week.
Several hours by train through mountains and valleys covered in red and orange oak, ash, aspen, birch, beech, and rowan, interspersed with green from fir, spruce, juniper, and yew, took him to the coast. On that part of the continent the forest reached almost down to the ocean and just a narrow band of pebble beaches and round-backed islets, many only visible at low tide, kept the sea from the land.
As most other small towns along the coast, it was a holiday resort, and like most such places it went into hibernation in late autumn. Visiting such places out of season was unsettling and alienating, like staying in a large office after everyone else has left. The physical objects, the streets and buildings and shops and piers, were still there, in the same location as they would be in the summer, with even some of the carts that sold hot dogs and ice cream and candy floss, and some of the booths that offered t-shirts and postcards and model ships in the high season, were still open, but the lack of people, the surplus of public space, and the gray light of autumn, made everything look run down and lonely.
Large tracts of the seaside walk were covered in scaffolding and put in dry dock by temporary wooden walls. There, the water had been bilged back into the ocean by peristaltic pipes and compressors, although the enclosures were wet and slowly refilling. Plastic signs bearing the town’s crest explained that the seaside walk was in the process of being elevated and
strengthened to be able to withstand the increased erosion of the higher sea level and more frequent winter storms. The text further apologized for the unsightly conditions and claimed that the process would be complete by a date several years into the future.
He nevertheless enjoyed the stroll along the sea, the hiss of the white waves against the stone, the constant wind from the ocean, and the dim, heavy sky. The gale nipped at his mountain jacket and he was glad he was carrying his thirty-liter backpack, since it helped keep the wind out. The rain tasted salty from the spray of the waves and he had to stop for a moment to take his leather gloves out of the backpack and pull them on.
On his way along the frothing seaside, he passed a wall so thick with layer upon layer of glued-on posters and flyers the surface seemed almost like papier mache. The announcements advertised the previous summer’s performances by various bands, stand-up comedians, tattoo masters, circus acts, fortune tellers, and magicians. He passed his eyes over the rotting, water-peeled sheets to find the most overdone and improbable of them. But then one of the posters presented a familiar name, an address in the town center, and a time just a few hours into the future. Blood shot into his head and he suddenly felt warm. The still-intact paper and the not-yet-faded print hinted that the ad was relatively recent. He gaped, looked again, then took out his phone and photographed the address on the flyer. With his heart beating hard, he continued to the doctor’s office.
In a corner of the waiting room stood a small spruce, its flat, shiny needles revealing its plastic nature, decorated with small electrical lights and glittering red tinsel. Lengths of artificial mistletoe garlanded the walls of the room. He smirked a little at the festive display, December being several months away. But here, summer probably started right after Easter and lasted till the
autumn holidays. No wonder they wanted Christmas to arrive as quickly as possible.
“You’re going for a pilot’s license, then?” the doctor, a brown-haired woman just a few years older than him, said as she fastened a blood pressure cuff around his arm.
“Yes, starting this spring,” he lied. Trying out for the astronaut selection wasn’t something he wished to share, especially not to a stranger.
“That’s rare,” the doctor said. “I mostly see requests for diving licenses, you know with the tourists and all, but the tests are nearly identical.”
He nodded. “I’m tempted to get that license too,” he said for the sake of small talk.
The doctor performed all the necessary tests, for blood pressure, heart status, lung function, hearing, ear-nose-throat, visual acuity, and color blindness. He had emailed the form in advance and the doctor promised to fill it out, sign it, and send it back to him within a week.
When he left the doctor’s office it had grown almost dark. The rain had ceased, giving way to a rushing wind. At the edge of the horizon, between the black ocean and the pewter sky, a slice of orange burned, like the last embers of a fire. The drawstrings on his jacket whipped in the gale and even inside the gloves his fingers began to feel cold and stiff. He pulled out the schedule he’d picked up at the train station, the paper dog-eared and damp from his pocket. The next train left at six, the last one at nine. It was nearly five o’clock. He decided to attend the meeting advertised by the poster.