[42] After me there will be no time

I’ve got insight into my condition, what they called it, the doctors. As if getting better was about getting their approval. Basically, you feel bad, and then you feel worse about feeling bad, and then you feel even worse about feeling worse, and so on down into the spiralling pit. Then your mother belittles you for not liking yourself, though half of you is acting miserable just to show her she’s right that you’re worthless, in case you can earn her love that way, which never works, though she never tells you that. There’s no way to let the poison out. But sooner or later, maybe, you get tired of grinding yourself in that mill, and stumble onto happiness despite yourself. A taste of it, one drop on your tongue, and another if you’re lucky, and another now that you recognize it, at some point if you remember clearly enough those moments – I’d never thought that happy memories could save me as easily as the bad ones could ruin me – and start to draw lines from dot to dot, if you’re very lucky you start to understand that every individual you fear, which is all of them, is at least as mad as you are most of the time, and that there’s nothing unique about being afraid, and that happiness exists, but you have to know it before you can look for it. Happiness is unique that way, and you don’t need anyone’s permission to seek your own resources. Getting angry is helpful, as long as it isn’t at yourself. If you’re going to strike, better out than in, but it’s the hardest thing there is to learn. You feel this need to ask someone’s permission to be angry, when the whole point of being angry is that you don’t ask permission. You really have to believe you have nothing to lose – that’s the only way to start learning it. If you grow up rich and cossetted and sheltered, like I did, like Emil did, anger is something you don’t have much reason to practise. Money buys a lot of safety, so that in the end, you learn to buy your way through life instead of having to reach for it. Sometimes being deranged is the only power a person has in the world, the only leverage they’ve got over the crowds, the dark forces, them. It’s the poor, the shell people, who have that kind of nerve – they have no choice but to find it, because we’ve goaded them into … you know … find it or die, you lumps. It’s how they survive. So when half the Inner World leaves this city on May Day, and the police and the cavalry come out to protect who’s left, and the marchers from the Factory Outlet in their leather aprons and red ribbons form their lines and take control, I almost have to laugh. I’m one of the hated ones to they. But what they show on May Day is better than being silent and alone, like most people are, no matter how much money they’ve got.

Misery isn’t much fun any more. The past month and the next couple have to be about Paul, and as long as he’s working hard and well, my life is complete. My life is basically about him. When he surfaces at dusk, I’ve got his attention, and so does Johnny, but when he isn’t there, I’m alone and that’s all right too. He’s in the studio before daylight. I go up there at dawn to pose for him and to just be where we both want me to be. Then I go on Johnny walks if the wind is down and the ice isn’t bad. I still don’t trust myself on ice, I’m still walking too much like an old woman. Some afternoons, Johnny and I go to grandfather’s and eat cabbage soup and read his books together and listen to the shop bell ring. That, or I have my mystery errands – the ones that are a mystery to Paul, anyway. He has 24,532 kroner in an accessible savings account at 3.25 compounded, but perhaps, the teller yesterday says, your husband would prefer to transfer it into a closed account at 3.75 percent. Is that one year closed, good sir? I rub my forehead for a quick minute, think that’s 412 extra kroner next New Year, and show him the proxy that Paul signed last year when we came here for him to open an account I could reach. That chore depressed him for three days – direct to the hands. Paul dreads touching money. I’ll put a couple of coins in his pocket in the morning for tobacco and a great brown one, but not the folding kind – he can’t bear to feel it on his hands. It was the same when we had four kroner between us and no roof. I buy cheese and rolls and a chicken and spices from Rotman’s down the street for evening delivery. I stop at the Singing Swan for a slow hour, and drink rhum coffee and gossip with Josette and her penguin husband. And then back upstairs at five, when I know Paul will still be out for his ten thousand metres. Dinner on the stovetop for him to light, a bottle of red open to breathe. And I take Johnny to the studio for the evening inspection, Paul’s profane garden.