The Greenhouse (3 page)

It’s precisely at the moment when the plane is lifting off the runway and shooting away from the frosty pink snow that I feel a distinct jab of pain in my stomach. I lean over my neighbor to catch a final glimpse through the porthole, of the mountain below, like violet mounds of meat splattered with streaks of white fat. The woman in a yellow polo presses herself back against her seat to give me the full view of her window. But I soon grow tired of measuring her breasts against the string of craters and lose interest in the view. Although I should be feeling lighter, the pain in my gut prevents me from full-heartedly appreciating the sense of freedom that is meant to accompany being above everything that is below. I’m conscious of—rather than actually seeing—the black lava, yellow withered grass, milky rivers, corrugated terrain of tussocks, marshes, fields of wilting lupin, and beyond that an endless stretch of rock. And what could be more hostile than rocks; surely roses can’t grow in the middle of broken rocks? This is undoubtedly an extraordinarily beautiful country, and although I’m fond of many things here, both places and people, it’s best kept on a stamp.

I stretch into the backpack shortly after takeoff to see how the rose cuttings are faring at an altitude of thirty-three thousand feet. They’re still wrapped in the moist newspapers, which I adjust around the green shoots. The fact that I accidentally chose an obituaries page is no doubt apt, considering my current physical state, and also a demonstration of how coincidences can work in subtle ways. At the moment in which I’m detaching myself from the earth below, it’s not unnatural to be thinking of death. I’m a twenty-two-year-old man and bound to sink into contemplating death several times a day. Second comes the body, both my own and that of others, and in third place there are the roses and other plants, although the exact order in which I ponder on these three things may vary from day to day. I put the plants down again and sit in the seat beside the woman.

In addition to the pain, which is now turning into a throbbing ache, I feel a mounting nausea and bend over, clutching my stomach. The sound of the engines reminds me of the fishing boat and how nauseous it made me feel in those four months of constant seasickness. I didn’t even need a rough sea; the moment I stepped onto the boat my stomach started to surge and I lost all my bearings. As soon as the steel hull started to amplify the sea’s vibrations and sway to its rhythm against the wharf, I’d burst into a cold sweat, and by the time we’d raised the anchor, I would already have thrown up once. When I was too seasick to sleep I’d go on deck and peer into the fog, watching the horizon swell up and down, as I tried to steady the waves. After nine fishing trips I was the palest man on the planet; even my eyes were a floating, watery blue.

—That’s the snag about being red-haired, the most experienced crewmember had said, they always get the worst seasickness.

—And they rarely come back, said another.

The air hostesses scuttle between the seats; legs in brown nylon stockings and high-heeled mules are now in my direct line of vision as I crouch in a crash-landing position. They’ve got their eye on me and shuffle up and down the aisle to check on me, dust the fluff off the back of my seat, offer me a pillow and blanket, adjust and rearrange.

—Would you like a pillow, would you like a blanket? they ask with anxious airs, slipping a pillow under my head and throwing a blanket over me. Then they move away again to discuss my case.

—Are you sick? my neighbor in the yellow polo in the window seat asks.

—Yeah, I’m not feeling too good, I say.

—Don’t be afraid, she says with a smile, adjusting the blanket over me. I realize now she could be Mom’s age. There are three women tending to me on the plane; I’m a little boy on the verge of tears. I stretch in my seat and peer under the tinfoil lid over the tray of food. Then, when a hostess passes, I ask her what was in the meal.

—I’ll check, she says and vanishes down the aisle.

She doesn’t come straight back, however, and just to show the woman sitting next to me that I’m a well-brought-up fellow, which Mom would certainly confirm, I hold out my hand and introduce myself.

—Arnljótur Thórir.

And better still I dig into my leather jacket and pull out a photograph of a bareheaded infant in a green bodysuit. She might very well be thinking that it isn’t very manly of me to be traveling with flower cuttings wrapped in soaked obituaries and to be throwing up the in-flight meal, but I’m not going to give her a chance to ask me any personal questions or even to offer me chocolate, but stay one step ahead of her.

—My daughter, I say, handing her the photograph.

She seems slightly taken aback, but then gives me a friendly smile, fishes her glasses out of her handbag, takes the photograph, and holds it up to the light.

—Pretty child, she says. How old is she?

—Five months old when that picture was taken. Six and a half now, I add. I feel like saying six months and nineteen days, but the pain in my gut won’t allow me to dwell on such details.

—A beautiful and intelligent-looking child, she repeats, big bright eyes. She doesn’t have a lot of hair for a girl, though, I thought she was a boy, to be honest.

The woman looks at me warmly.

—As far as I remember she’d just woken up and they’d just taken her bonnet off, I say, that’s why the hair’s like that. Yeah, she was just out of the carriage, I add. I take the picture back and stick it into my pocket. I’ve nothing to add on the subject of my daughter’s lack of hair, so that topic has been exhausted. And this weird pain is rapidly starting to dominate all my thoughts. I have to throw up again, and when I close my eyes I have a flashback of the green sauce over the fried fish. My neighbor looks at me anxiously. I don’t have the energy for any further conversation so I pretend I’ve got other things to be thinking about and rummage through my backpack again. I dig out the book with my collection of dried plants and, as if I were being mocked by fate, immediately stumble upon the page with the oldest plants: the pressed six-leaf clovers, which were all picked on the same morning in our tiny yard back home. Dad thought it was significant that I had found these three six-leaf clovers on my sixth birthday, and saw it as a lucky omen for what lay ahead, at the birthday party later that day maybe, or some dream that would come true, such as a tree growing in the garden for me to climb on.

—Is that a plant collection you’ve got with you? my female neighbor asks, visibly interested. I don’t answer but carefully fish out a clover and hold it up against the reading light; it’s the last one that’s still intact, delicate and fragile, eternity’s flower. I think I’m more than likely suffering from an acute case of food poisoning, but it’s no doubt symbolic of the state of my life that the stem of the plant is hanging from a blue thread.

—Are you sure you’ll be all right on your own? the hostess asks me as I walk down the aisle to the exit. You’re very pale.

The moment I step off the plane, the head hostess taps me on the shoulder and says:

—We tried to find out what food it was, two of us tasted it, but we’re not sure. Sorry. But it’s definitely either fish in breadcrumbs with a cream cheese filling or chicken in breadcrumbs with a cream cheese filling.

An airport official writes an address on a slip of paper that I crumple in my clenched clammy palm.

I’m in a city I’ve never been in before, my very first port of call abroad, and I’m curled up on the backseat of a taxi. The backpack is beside me, and the green shoots pierce through the newspaper wrapping in the top compartment. On second thought, I’m not sure whether I’m alone in the taxi; I can’t exclude the possibility that the woman in the yellow polo might have escorted me to my destination.

When the car stops by a sidewalk at a red light I can see people checking their reflections in my window as they pass.

The driver occasionally glances at me through his mirror. He’s got a big Alsatian in the front seat with a slavering tongue dangling from its mouth. I can’t see whether the dog is on a leash, but his eyes are fixed on me. I close my eyes, and when I open them again, the car has stopped in front of a hospital and the driver has turned around in his seat and is looking at me. He makes me pay double for having thrown up in his cab, but doesn’t look particularly angry; it’s more of a scolding air, perhaps, for my irresponsible behavior.

First, I carefully put down my backpack, making sure the moisture doesn’t leak off the rose cuttings. Then I lie down, stretching out on the plastic-covered examination bench. Twenty-two years old and already at the end of the road, the journey’s over before it’s even started. It takes me a long time to write my name on the form, letter by letter, absolutely ages. The woman who is helping me to lie down in the fluorescent-lit examination room has shiny brown hair as well as brown eyes and is doing everything to assist me. I’m naked down to the waist and am now taking my trousers off. Is this how Mom felt, too, when she was dying out in the lava field in the arms of strangers? At any rate it’s clear that the day of my death will be a happy day for many of the inhabitants of this globe; by the time the sun has set, multitudes will have been born in my place and countless wedding feasts will have been held.

Not that dying is any big deal, since almost all of the best sons and daughters of this planet have died ahead of me. Naturally it’ll be a blow for my aging father, my autistic twin brother will develop some new system without me, and the as-yet speechless newborn who was still too small to sleep over will never get to know her father. I do have some regrets, mind you. I wish I’d slept around a bit more and planted the rose cuttings in the soil.

When the girl with the shiny hair gently places her hand on my stomach, I notice she’s got a green clasp in her hair that’s shaped like a butterfly. The woman who is nursing me in the final quarter of an hour of my existence bears the symbol of the continuity of life in her hair.

Rose cuttings can’t survive without water, which is why I hoist myself up on my elbows and point at the backpack.

—Plants, I say.

She stoops over the backpack and moves it closer to the bed. I don’t even have to know the right words; I point and she’s a woman who can understand me. For a moment, I therefore briefly consider whether we might have made a pair, if I hadn’t been on my way out of this world, as it were. She could be ten years older, about thirty-two, but right now that doesn’t feel like any age gap worth quibbling about. The sinister pain in my gut, however, prevents me from developing this steady relationship of ours any further. When I’ve finished throwing up the remains of the airplane breadcrumbs and cheese sauce, she helps me to carefully unwrap the moist newspaper from the rose cutting, as if she were removing the bandages around a patient’s leg after a successful operation.

—Did you bring plants with you? she asks, and now that she’s closer I see that there are yellow dots on the butterfly’s wings.

—Yes, I reply in her language with the fluency of a native.

She nods as if I am a man who knows what he’s talking about.

Then I throw in some Latin for good measure:

—
Rosa candida.

When it comes to plants and cultivation, my performance and vocabulary both expand considerably. Then I add:

—Without thorns.

—Without thorns, really? she says, folding my jeans and placing them tidily on the chair, over my blue cable-knit sweater, the last sweater Mom knit for me. In a moment’s time the woman with a butterfly hair clip will also be the last of seven women to have seen me naked.

—And are the other two plants also—she hesitates—
Rosa candida
?

—Yes, for safety, I say, to produce offspring, just in case one of them dies, I say, allowing myself to slip back onto the plastic mattress again.

Since she has already been witness to my suffering, and helped me to throw up and water the rose cuttings, I feel the urge to share something more personal with her. Which is why I pull out the photo of my child and hand it to her.

—My daughter, I say.

She takes the picture and scrutinizes it.

—Cute, she says and smiles at me. How old is she?

She asks simple and manageable questions that my grasp of the language can easily handle.

—About seven months.

—Very cute, she repeats, but not much hair for a seven-month-year-old girl maybe.

This I had not been expecting. You place your trust in another person’s hands, sharing something important with them in that final moment, and they let you down. All of a sudden I feel it’s vital that the last person I communicate with in this life should understand this hair thing once and for all. That photographs can be deceiving and that hair on blond children isn’t particularly visible in the first year, that there’s no comparison to dark-haired children who are normally born with a lot of hair. There’s a lot I’d like to get off my chest, and it’s only my pain and limited linguistic skills that are preventing me from defending my daughter.

—About seven months, I repeat, as if this definitively explained the lack of hair. Then I realize it was a bit rash of me to show her the photograph and I no longer want her to be fidgeting with it.

—Give it to me, I say abruptly, stretching out my hand to take the picture back. I look at Flóra Sól, my daughter, grinning with two teeth in her lower gum, and remember in fact seeing her with a small curl of hair over her forehead, fresh out of the bath, when I came to say my good-byes to her and her mother without ringing ahead of me.

I close my eyes as I’m wheeled into the operating theater and feel cold under the sheet. Pain is the only tangible reality I can cling to right now, although my suffering obviously pales into insignificance when compared to the mutilations and horrors of this world, droughts, hurricanes, and warfare.

I try to gauge my chances of survival in the expressions and gestures of the people dressed in green. Someone says something to someone else, who laughs heartily behind a green mask; it’s not as if there’s anything serious going on here, not as if anyone’s about to die. There could be nothing more crushing in my final moments than to be subjected to the flippancy of this motley crew, the careless, slapdash attitudes of those who’ll still be here once I’m gone. They aren’t even talking about me—as far as I can make out—but some movie that one of them went to see and that someone else is going to see tonight.
The Poppy Field
, yeah, I’ve heard about that movie, it’s about a man who’s badly rejected and kidnaps the woman who rejected him and then they rob a bank together; the movie recently won some special award at a film festival.

Suddenly someone briskly strokes my hair. My ginger mop of hair, Mom would have said.

—Don’t worry, it’s your appendix, someone says behind a mask.

Strokes
isn’t really the right word. It’s more as if someone were briskly running their fingers through my hair. I’m a bird and take off with heavy flapping wings. Hovering in midair above, I follow what’s going on below but take no part in it, because I’m free from all things. In the instant before everything fades I feel I can hear Dad beside me:

—There’s no future in roses, Lobbi boy.