Chapter Thirty-Six
THIRTY-SIX
Ted has read so many books with explanations of what fear does to the human body, but always gets annoyed by the most basic supposition: that fear is described as something abnormal. As if we shouldn’t be afraid all the time.
When you get chased, your brain immediately channels power to what matters most, like a backup generator in a power outage, so the parts that govern logical thought and strategic planning shut down. A million thoughts get filtered down into a single one: survival. When Ted gets nervous, he loses all sensation in his nose, that’s why he puts his glasses on and takes them off so often, why he pretends to polish them, because fear changes our blood flow and the heart supplies the biggest muscles first. When someone is being chased, their hands go cold and their digestive system shuts down to save energy. It might sound remarkable, that the body is biologically prepared for something as unlikely as being chased, but of course the opposite is true. This is exactly what we’re built for. Throughout our entire existence we have been on the run, first from wild animals, then from each other.
“RUN!” Louisa yells as Ted limps across the train tracks.
She jumps over a small fence on the other side as if it were nothing. Ted, on the other hand, struggles to get over it and tears a hole in his pants on the barbed wire, lands with a thud on the ground next to her just as another train appears. For a few blessed moments it forms a wall between them and the men on the platform, but as it roars past just a few yards from them and the ground shakes, Ted curls up as if he’s about to get kicked again. Eventually a body can’t handle any more fear, any more flight, and he closes his eyes and just wants to sleep now. Louisa doesn’t let him.
“COME ON!” she demands, tugging at his dirty suit jacket. “They’re going to get their car and drive round the station and chase us on the other side, we need to hide!”
They slide down a grass bank toward a small square and a deserted parking lot. Louisa looks desperately for somewhere to hide, heads over to a thick clump of bushes, and shoves Ted straight into it. Soon they see the headlights of a car slowly coming closer. Somewhere in the distance a dog barks.
Ted can’t remember a time in his life when he wasn’t thinking about death. The brain is so strange. As he huddles in the bushes, with the smell of the earth in his nostrils and the sound of barking dogs in his ears, he remembers his dad’s funeral twenty-five years ago. The minister in the church had kept it brief, some might even have called it “unsentimental,” but it was probably actually the opposite. It would only have taken the slightest note on the organ, one sob, the smallest change in the air, for every person in the pews to have broken into a billion pieces that day. The fact that the minister said so little was an act of mercy, his audience couldn’t bear to feel any more than they already did. Grief is a luxury for those living an easier life.
It had been early July, during the night a storm had passed over the town and the rain remained as a cold curtain, after the funeral the adults hurried to their cars, hunched up. The only person who remained in the church was Ted, no one noticed he was missing because no one noticed he was around. He was like a piece of lint on clothing, Joar used to joke, you could go a whole day and suddenly you would catch sight of him and think: Oh! How long has that been there?
Ted’s mom hadn’t said a word after she got home from the hospital the night his dad died. Ted’s big brother had sat in front of the empty beer cans on the piano every morning, but never played anything. The only thing he had said to Ted before the funeral was: “We mustn’t cry. We have to be strong, for Mom’s sake.” Ted had promised. He and his brother had sat there in the front pew and been what they thought men should be, strong and silent.
Afterward, when Ted was sitting there on his own and the tall roof of the church left him in an echo with no content, he could only hear silence upon silence. He remembers thinking that if he stayed in there, his dad wasn’t dead, not really, as long as he didn’t go out into the rain and reality. He tried to remember his dad’s voice, or his laugh, but there was nothing but emptiness inside him where those sounds should have been. He had realized then why his big brother and his mom were so angry all the time, why they hated Ted so intensely, because Ted was only fourteen years old. He could only remember the dad who had been sick. He hadn’t lost the happy dad, the one who existed before, the dad who had played the piano. That must have been much worse, Ted thought.
“Good night, ghosts,” he had whispered into the emptiness.
Only then did he cry.
He didn’t hear the church door open. Exactly when they came in or how long they had been there before he noticed them, he had no idea, but suddenly they were all around him: Joar, Ali, and the artist. Like lint on clothing. They had no words, so they let him cry, only not alone.
“Shhh!” Louisa whispers in the bushes.
Ted realizes, to his shame, that he has been sobbing out loud. His brain is so stupid, it can no longer tell the difference between threat and reality, he’s just frightened of everything all the time. The young men’s car comes slowly along the road, they’re staring at the fence by the train tracks where Ted tore his pants when he climbed over. One of the men leans out the window and peers toward the bushes where they’re hiding, but he’s unlucky, because at that moment a taxi comes along from the other direction. It stops right in front of Ted and Louisa. The men in the car are blinded by the taxi’s headlights and swear loudly.
The taxi driver, an old man with the body of an oversize duvet squeezed into a too-small bag, gets out like an elk getting out of a ditch. Then he stands next to the bushes, legs apart, right in front of Louisa and Ted, and starts to undo his belt.
Louisa whispers:
“No… no, no, no, tell me he isn’t going to pee…”
He most definitely is. Louisa shuffles backward, deeper into the bushes, dragging Ted with her. But just as the taxi driver has undone his pants, one of the young men in the car calls out:
“Hey, you, old man! Have you seen an old guy and a girl?”
The taxi driver turns around in surprise.
“Here? Not a person here, no! Why else I’m having a piss here, you think?”
The men appear to consider this for a few moments. They certainly don’t give the impression of being particularly quick-witted, but eventually one of them can be heard swearing again. Then the engine revs and the car skids away and disappears.
The taxi driver fiddles with his belt for a good while before he finally looks over his shoulder and mumbles:
“Safe now. Safe for you two to come out now, I think.”
When Ted and Louisa don’t emerge at once, the taxi driver leans closer to the bushes and says:
“My friends, I have many, many children. I am very, very good at hide-and-seek.”
So Louisa gives up and cautiously sticks her head out, but she’s clutching a stick in her hand.
“Back off!” she demands.
The taxi driver obeys with his hands raised.
“Backing off, backing off. But if hiding, I’m just saying, maybe hide with a more agile friend than your friend in there, yes? Saw him limping from the tracks from a mile away, I did. As agile as a fridge, that one.”
Louisa holds the stick in her hand as she crawls out of the bushes. Only then does she realize that the taxi driver actually isn’t an old man at all, but an old woman.
“So you… you weren’t going to have a pee? You were just pretending?” Louisa deduces.
“Pee? In bushes? Not an animal, am I?” the taxi driver snorts.
Louisa gets to her feet, looks the taxi driver up and down, and finally drops the stick. Ted comes crawling out on all fours.
“Are you okay?” Louisa asks.
“Great. Tremendous. Never been better,” he grunts, getting to his feet with all the grace of a pony in high heels.
The taxi driver grimaces with sympathy when she sees how bruised his face is.
“Ouch! Lucky you were, yes? Isn’t safe round here at night, it isn’t.”
“Thanks, we noticed that,” Louisa points out.
“Got off at the wrong station, yes?” the taxi driver wonders, gesturing off toward the train tracks.
“You could say that,” Louisa admits, then she nods toward Ted: “He left something on the train. Something… important. Could you help us catch up with it?”
The taxi driver smiles a smile where roughly every fourth tooth seems to be in the right place.
“Catch up with train ?”
Louisa sighs when she realizes how stupid her question was. But it isn’t so damn easy to know, she hasn’t been in a car that many more times than she’s been on a train. Ted takes the roll of tape out of his pocket again and nervously begins to repair his glasses.
“We have to…,” he begins, without having the slightest idea how he’s going to finish the sentence, but the taxi driver interrupts him:
“Catch up with TRAIN!”
“Excuse me?”
The taxi driver’s eyes sparkle as wildly as a badger’s after a double espresso.
“Yes! Catch up with train, we will! Come!”
Louisa lights up as if someone has given her ice cream and fireworks.
“Really? Yes! We’ll catch up with the train! COME ON, TED!”
Ted puts his glasses on.
“I don’t know if this is such a great idea…,” he whispers.
Louisa immediately misunderstands and bites her cheeks.
“Sorry. You don’t want me to come. I get it. It’s…”
“No. I mean, yes! Of course I do! What are you talking about?” he groans.
Her hands are shaking. She wishes she were as good at abandoning people as she is at being abandoned, but it feels too late now.
“I understand that you’re angry. But I just want to help you find the painting and the ashes, I don’t want it to be my fault that—” she begins.
“I know, my God, of course I know, that isn’t what I meant…,” Ted insists.
“What the hell did you mean, then?” Louisa says in response. Her talent for switching from defense lawyer to prosecutor in an instant really is unsurpassed.
“I mean that maybe it isn’t such a good idea for us to jump into a stranger’s car ,” Ted whispers, so the taxi driver won’t hear.
“Do you want the painting back or not? Are you worried we’re going to get robbed by an OLD LADY or something?” Louisa whispers back, which she obviously does so well that the taxi driver only manages to hear absolutely everything. The woman laughs at Ted.
“Scared? Scared of me? I’m old, very old. Dangerous as a meatball, I am.”
“Ted’s scared of everything,” Louisa informs her helpfully.
“No I’m not!” Ted protests, affronted, but at that moment, unfortunately, the dog barks in the distance once more and he jumps as if someone has put pins in his underpants.
“Scared of dog?” the taxi driver wonders.
“Reaaally scared of dogs,” Louisa nods.
Ted turns toward them with his feet wide apart and puts his hands on his hips like a very angry and very short Superman and snaps:
“I am definitely not scared of dogs!”