The Happiest People in the World
Read The Happiest People in the World Online
Authors: Brock Clarke
The
Happiest
People
in the
World
a novel by
Brock Clarke
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
2014
Also by Brock Clarke
Exley
An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England
Carrying the Torch
What We Won't Do
The Ordinary White Boy
For Lane
He is the quintessential Dane, with his fear, his iron resolve to repress what's happening around him. And his indomitable optimism.
â
PETER HOEG
, Smilla's Sense of Snow
The game could continue, and now she could fight with her own weapons. Which she believed were pure.
â
TOVE JANSSON
, The True Deceiver
“I could kill him. . . . But would that be enough?”
â
MURIEL SPARK
, The Finishing School
Contents
PART ONE
T
he moose head was fixed to the wall, the microphone in its mouth was broken, but the camera in its left eye was working just fine, and as far as the moose head could see, this was just another Friday night in the Lumber Lodge! Perhaps even more Friday night than most Friday nights. In fact, it was barely evening at allâthe camera had just begun recording, as it did every night, at 5 p.m.âbut it looked a lot like closing time. The smoke, for instance! New York State law had been insisting for years now that no one was allowed to smoke in this bar or in any other bar, but this law, like most lawsâincluding the United States' laws preventing unauthorized surveillance of its citizensâwas often ignored, and wow, was it being ignored tonight. The smoke was so thick the moose head was barely able to see the people it was intended to spy on. Finally, at 5:04 p.m., the smoke had thinned enough for the moose head to tell how very drunk all the people were. They were so very drunk that they were sprawled out on the floor, all of themâthe boy who was clearly too young to be in the bar in the first place (another law broken, ignored); the blond woman who spent more time in the bar than anyone; the man who was wearing a red hat with a white letter
C
on it; the man who, along with the blond woman, the moose head had watched put up streamers all around the Lumber Lodge the day before; the woman and the man and the other man who had put the microphone and the camera in the moose head in the first place; the man with the ruined hand; the man with the garish shirt; the woman with the black hair who was clutching another red baseball hat with the white letter
C
on it; the man with the new haircut; the dark-skinned man the moose head had never seen beforeâall of them lying on the floor, obviously drunk, obviously completely
plastered,
grabbing at each other, reaching out for each other, yelling at each other (the moose head could not hear them but could see the O shapes their yelling mouths made), wrestling with each other, hugging each other, crawling away from and toward each other across the beer-and-booze-stained wooden floor. The stains were darkâdarker than the usual stainsâbut then again these people were clearly drunker than the usual drunks, so they must have consumed alcohol darker and stronger than their usual alcohol. The moose head was not capable of judging these people; the moose head simply watched them the way the moose head had watched so many other drunks on so many other Friday nights. By 5:11 p.m. all but four of them had passed out. Among the still-conscious was one of the men who had put the microphone in the moose head's mouth and the camera in its left eye. He pushed himself up on his elbows, looked confusedly around the room, as though not sure to which person, which people, he should attempt to crawl, and whether he wanted to help or hurt them. Finally the man shouted something at the moose headâwhich, of course, the moose head could not hear, because the man had not fixed or replaced the broken microphoneâand then fell off his elbows and to the floor again. The man wearing the hat was also awake, and with his free hand he had taken the other red hat out of the black-haired woman's hand and was attempting to place it on her head. He finally managed to do that. Then he, too, passed out. Across the room, the boy was on his knees, saying something to the blond woman. The moose head could not see the boy's face now, but the boy's shoulders were shaking, clearly with laughter. By 5:16 the boy had collapsed onto the blond woman's chest. That left the man who had helped the blond woman put up the streamers the day before. The moose head could not think, but had it been able to, the streamers would have explained the extreme early drunkenness: it was a party! But anyway, the man was on his feet now. The moose head could see that on the floor, next to the man's right foot, was a gun, and that there were several other guns scattered among the passed-out bodies. The moose head could not worry, any more than it could think or judge, but had the moose head been able to worry, the guns might have worried it. But maybe not. Because the man kicked the nearest gun as if the gun didn't worry him even a little bit, kicked it away from the passed-out drunks and in the direction of the moose head, then kicked the rest of the guns in the direction of the moose head, as though this were a game, a game called kick the guns in the direction of the moose head. Then, when he was done with the game, he started running around the room, periodically bending over, shaking people, clearly having a good time fuckin' with them (before the moose head's microphone stopped working, the phrase it had most often heard coming out of the drunks in the Lumber Lodge was the phrase “Oh, I'm just fuckin' with you”â“fuckin' with you” apparently being the thing that the less drunk had a good time doing to the more drunk). Finally the man reached the blond woman and the boy. He knelt down next to them, his back facing the moose head. As with the boy, the moose head could not see the man's face, but the moose head could see the man put his arms around the woman and the boy. The moose head watched the man hug them for a long time, watched his shoulders shaking harder even than the boy's shoulders had, obviously laughing, just laughing and laughing as though he were the happiest person in the world, as though he knew that nothing bad would ever happen to him, or to any of them.
PART TWO
I
n September 2005 the Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten
published twelve editorial cartoons, many of them depicting the Islamic prophet Muhammad. The newspaper had solicited the cartoons, and published them along with an explanation: “Modern, secular society is rejected by some Muslims. They demand a special position, insisting on special consideration of their own religious feelings. It is incompatible with contemporary democracy and freedom of speech, where one must be ready to put up with insults, mockery, and ridicule. It is certainly not always attractive and nice to look at, and it does not mean that religious feelings should be made fun of at any price, but that is of minor importance in the present context . . . We are on our way to a slippery slope where no-one can tell how the self-censorship will end. That is why
Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten
has invited members of the Danish editorial cartoonists union to draw Muhammad as they see him.”
They did that. One cartoonâdepicting Muhammad with a bomb in his turbanâwas particularly controversial. Once the cartoons became known outside Denmarkâit took some time for them to become knownâthey caused several Middle Eastern countries to boycott Danish products and goods, and also caused protests and riots in several of those same countries and in Denmark as well. More than one hundred people were killed in these protests and riots. The Danish Embassy in Pakistan was bombed, and Denmark's embassies in Syria, Lebanon, and Iran were set on fire. There have been several attempts and plots to kill the creator of the most controversial of the cartoons, and in 2010 the Danish police arrested five men who were suspected of planning an attack on the offices of
Jyllands-Posten,
the newspaper that first published the cartoons.
That much is pretty well known.
What is only slightly less well known is that soon after the first Danish Embassy was torched, soon after the first death threat, soon after the first attempted murder of the cartoonist, the editor of a newspaper (the
Optimist
) in Skagen, Denmark, asked his staff cartoonist (he had only one; it was a weekly newspaper with a small circulation) to draw a cartoon depicting in some way or other the controversy over the by now infamous cartoons of Muhammad.
“Me?” the cartoonist asked. His name was Jens Baedrup. He'd worked at the paper for nine years. Mostly he drew cartoons of local interest: tourists eating hot dogs while walking too slowly on the pedestrian mall; grizzled fishermen acting surprised at seeing fish they'd just caught on display at the market, as though to say, What are
you
doing here?; Skagenians caught in bad weather and making the best of it. In fact, his most recent cartoon had been of a man and a woman standing under a roof and the man saying, “At least we have a roof over our heads!” and the woman not saying anything, just looking miserable, because she was drenched, and so was he, because the rain was blowing sideways and the roofed structure they were standing under had no walls.
“Yes. You.”
“Why?” the cartoonist asked. Of course, he'd been following the whole thing on television, on the radio, in the newspaper. It made him anxious, angry, annoyed, the way things do when you don't know whom to blame. But then again, those cartoons had been published in a Copenhagen newspaper, and Skagen was as far away from Copenhagen as you could get and still be in Denmark. In fact, it was common for people in Skagen, after learning of some outrageous news coming out of the nation's capital five hours to the south, to shrug it off by saying, “But that's Copenhagen.”
“Because this is important,” the editor said. “I think you'll do a good job. I can't think of anyone I'd rather have do this than you.”
The cartoonist recognized that this was tainted praise, or at least praise with an ulterior motive, but that did not mean he was immune to it. He thought for a minute. He would have asked his wife her opinion, but she had gone to visit her parents in Aarhus and wasn't due back in Skagen for another week. He could have called her on the phone, of course. But things had not been going too well with them. Lately, every little disagreement threatened to turn into a large argument, which then threatened to turn into a referendum on the marriage itself. And one of the things they most often argued about was the cartoonist's unshakable optimism, his belief that everything was going to be just fine. He knew, if he called and asked her whether he should draw the cartoon, she would question his mental health. I don't know what you're so worried about, he would then say. I think everything is going to be just fine. And then she would mockingly call him “the Skagen Optimist,” which, in addition to being the name of the newspaper, was also the name of his weekly cartoon. In fact, the cartoon of the man and his wife getting wet from the sideways rain had been based on something that had happened to them. Twice. The cartoonist thought that by having the wife in the cartoon remain silent (in real life she had not remained silent), his wife would not recognize herself in the cartoon. But this turned out to be yet another example of his overoptimism.
So instead of calling his wife, the cartoonist let his mind argue with itself, the way it does when it's about to let you do something that you'll later regret.
You really shouldn't do this (his mind said).
But I'll do a good job; the editor said so himself.
The editor is a liar.
Yes, but no one is a liar all the time.
But you don't even have a strong opinion about all this.
Who better to draw a cartoon like this than someone who doesn't have a strong opinion?
Tell that to the people who have strong opinions.
This is the
Skagen Optimist;
no one is ever going to see the cartoon anyway.
Then why do it?
Because it's my job.
And with that sentence, a good many arguments that should go on for much longer are brought to a close.
“Fine,” the cartoonist said to his editor. “I'll do it.”
“Good,” the editor said. “I'll need it before you go home tonight.”
After receiving his assignment, the cartoonist took a long walk through Skagen, his heart narrating his journey: Skagen, the town between two seas; the town with the pretty yellow houses with the red tile roofs and the neat yards; the town with the wet wind and the cold sand; the town that painters in the nineteenth century made famous for its light; the town where the eastward-moving waves from the North Sea crash into the westward-moving waves from the Baltic Sea, and the spectacle is so great that even the skeptical end up taking too many pictures; the town so orderly and good that even the hulking tankers from Sweden and Norway and England and Germany patiently wait in lines that stretch from one sea to another before easing into the docks at Skagen Havn. The town where my parents were born and where they died. The town where I was married in the big white church with the little white clipper ships dangling from the ceiling in between the chandeliers. The town I have lived in for forty-two years. The town I love.
It is said that the Danes are the happiest people in the world, and if that's true, then the people from Skagen are happier even than that. That was what the cartoonist was feeling. And he was also feeling that some of the cartoons in
Jyllands-Posten
had made him unhappy, and so had the violent reactions to them, and now so had his assignment. That's when he got his idea. He went back to the newspaper's office, drew a cartoon featuring a group of unhappy Danes (one knew they were Danes because they were frowning inexpertly, as if unhappiness had come to them only recently and they didn't quite know how to show it, and one also knew they were Danes because they were white), and hovering over them, like an ominous cloud, was the cartoonist's rendering of the now infamous cartoon of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. Once he was finished, Jens handed the cartoon to his editor, saying, “I think this is pretty good.”
The editor looked at the cartoon. He had been the newspaper's editor for three years, and he hated the job: the constant deadlines, the ink everywhere, the reporters' bad-tempered arguments about what constituted good grammar, the general sense of everything having been much better yesterday. He could have just quit, but the newspaper's publisher was his father. The paper had been owned and run by his family for almost two centuries. Quitting the paper would be like quitting his family: something that seemed less possible the more he wanted it. The editor just hadn't been able to figure a way out of the whole mess, until now.
“I do think it is pretty good,” he said to the cartoonist. Then he published it the next day.
Less than a week later, the
Skagen Optimist
decided, after someone had thrown Molotov cocktails through its windows, to shut down after nearly two hundred years of continuous publication. Meanwhile the cartoonist, accompanied by agents from the Danish Security and Intelligence Service, had gone to his in-laws' house in Aarhus. His wife met him at the door. She knew by now about the cartoon: it, and the cartoonist, had made the television news. She also knew about the death threats: they'd made the news, too. “Everything is going to be just fine,” Jens had told her repeatedly on the phone over the previous week.
“Oh, Jens,” she'd replied. “What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking everything was going to be just fine,” he'd said.
But she didn't know yet about their house: someone had set fire to it six hours earlier. He told her about it.
“Gone?” she said.
“I'm sorry, Ilsa,” he said.
“Gone,” she repeated. Her eyes were far away: he could see her seeing their house, their marriage. Gone, gone. Skagen would be gone for her, too. Jens would always want to go back to Skagen, but the agents told him he wouldn't be able to, because of their plan for him. Ilsa would be able to go back there if she wanted. But she wouldn't want to. She was from Aarhus. That was her home. For her, Skagen would always be the small town with the burned-down house and the ruined marriage. And that, to Jens, felt like the worst thing that had ever happened to him.
“Where will you go?” she asked him.
He cocked his head toward the car idling in the street behind him. “They're figuring that out right now,” he said. And then he told her the plan. The plan was for the agents to announce that Jens had been killed in the fire. The agents had recommended this. They'd told Jens that whoever had set the fire wouldn't stop trying to kill him until he was dead. So they were, with his permission, going to declare him dead. “It's the best way,” Jens told Ilsa, repeating what the agents had told him. He looked to see whether Ilsa understood all of this. She looked back at him with big, solemn eyes.
“What do I have to do?” she asked.
“You have to act like I'm dead,” he said.
She nodded. “I can do that,” she said.
After that, neither Jens nor Ilsa seemed to know what to say. Jens fought off the urge to tell her again that everything would be just fine, even though he really did believe that was true. He also fought off the urge to tell her he was scared, although that was true, too. Because what do you say when a marriage ends like this? Jens pictured a cartoon in which a man and a woman, the woman standing in front of a burning house and the man in front of an open grave, handed oversize wedding rings back to each other, the woman saying, “Well,
that
was a mistake.”
And then Jens turned, walked to the agents' car, got into the backseat, and closed the door. The car drove off. There were two agents in the front seat; Jens was by himself in the back. After a moment he said, “That was horrible. But I do think I got through it fairly well.” But the agents didn't respond. Possibly they didn't hear Jens, because he was crying so hard as he spoke, or because they were busy figuring out where they were going to take him next, where he was going to run.