The Discoverer (76 page)

‘What’s the record?’ Jonas asked.

Bo handed him the rest of the orange wedges as a consolation prize and took out his yellow notebook. ‘Eleven balls,’ he said. ‘Did you know that
scientists
today believe that the world has at least eleven dimensions?’ He could tell from Jonas’s face that he would have to explain again what dimension meant, even though he had already done so when talking about the Vegans’ hide-out.

‘I bet there are even more,’ Jonas said.

‘Just as one day somebody will manage to juggle with more than eleven balls,’ Bo said, and scribbled down something with the stub of pencil that was always tucked behind his ear.

That summer, Jonas actually did learn to juggle first with three oranges, then with four. He never felt quite the same about this golden fruit again; from then on he could never eat an orange without thinking of Bo Wang Lee. And for the rest of his life he was always able to impress anyone with his little party trick. Even in the midst of a serious discussion he was quite liable to suddenly toss four oranges into the air and thus manage to say something which he could not put into words. The following year, when Jonas met the triplets, the first thing he thought of was a juggling act, felt he was faced with the possibility of an extraordinary experience. All he had to do was to keep three schoolboy crushes in the air at one time.

But the best was yet to come. The day before the expedition into the forest – Jonas had just wrapped the four crystals carefully in four checkered handkerchiefs – they were in the room where Bo slept. Each sat with a mini bottle of Cola, sipping through a paper straw, as if to gather sustenance, while observing the way the four butterflies in the jars on Bo’s bedside table
mimicked
their actions, unrolling their probosces like straws and sipping from the orangeade tops filled with sugared water. In one of the open suitcases in the
bare, cabin-like room, Jonas spied a dubious-looking shoebox lying next to a Viewmaster containing pictures from Yellowstone National Park. He reached out for it, but Bo stopped him, as if it were taboo. Or private – because Bo opened the box himself, gently lifted out one object after another. ‘It’s just some things I’ve collected,’ he said. ‘Things to speed up the thought processes.’

Bo’s shoebox reminded Jonas of Aunt Laura’s story about the Renaissance princes and the curiosities they kept in secret rooms at the heart of their palaces. Bo laid the objects out on the bed. An old pocket watch which no longer worked, but had a nice pattern engraved on the lid; a pencil sharpener shaped like a globe; a chunk of rock with a trilobite embedded in it; a bunch of funny-looking keys; an old-fashioned purse containing three silver dollars – one of them with a bullet hole in it, made by Wild Bill Hickock. Jonas understood that he ought to take note of these things, since they probably said a lot about who Bo Wang Lee was.

As if to encourage Jonas, to give him heart before setting out on their hair-raising expedition in search of the Vegans, Bo began to juggle with first three, then four, and finally all of these objects. The spinning oranges had been a wonderful sight, but this was more wonderful. Much more. ‘This is the sort of thing we’re going to try to do,’ he told Jonas again, speaking as if through a circular portal. Although these things did not actually form a circle, like the sort you see in drawings of jugglers; they criss-crossed in mid-air in what was for Jonas the most mind-boggling fashion, tracing a loop rather like a figure-of-eight on its side. And Jonas stared and stared; he saw how the purse, a trilobite, a pocket-watch, a bundle of keys and a globe of the world seemed to hover in mid-air while at the same time forming a unified whole, what he would later describe as a synthesis. It was a concrete manifestation of something he had experienced before, many times, when thinking about several things at once. And not only several things, but several
different
things. And he was delighted to see that the result, this spellbinding infinity symbol which Bo was weaving with his hands, was something quite other than the sum of its individual parts; that it was a whole new, little world, one which belonged to another sphere or perhaps what Bo called another dimension. Or even Vega, he thought. Why not?

Bo juggled the objects so fast that soon they were nothing but a blur. It reminded him of that chain of Bo’s, the one with the words ‘I love you’ broken up into two incomprehensible sets of symbols on either side of a metal disc. Jonas perceived a great deal at that moment, as he watched a friend – a boy he had become closer to than anyone else in only three weeks – who juggled as brilliantly as any wizard. Jonas sensed that he too might be like that, that he could consist of two – or more – elements, completely dissimilar,
incomprehensible elements, which could, somehow or other, be set in motion in such a way that they spun together to form a whole. He also had the feeling that with his juggling act Bo was trying to tell him something else; that with this strange pattern in the air he might even be saying: ‘I love you.’

‘That … is absolutely phenomenal,’ Jonas stammered. He motioned to Bo to keep going while he went to fetch a camera from the living room. Jonas wanted with all his heart to capture this sight, since it was for him as
sensational
and indeed as unbelievable as a UFO. ‘Don’t stop,’ he said, backing cautiously towards the door. But at these words Bo lost his concentration and everything tumbled to the floor or, fortunately, onto a soft carpet. ‘Shit!’ Bo said nonetheless. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’

At the sight of the objects on the floor and Bo’s nimble fingers quickly gathering them up, as if he were anxious to hide something, Jonas felt another niggle of suspicion – he could not have said why – and decided that the time had come: ‘Bo, there’s something I need to ask you …’

‘Have you seen these?’ And all of a sudden Bo became a whirlwind, roiling around in another suitcase. ‘American comics!’ And Jonas forgot all else. For a while.

But he never forgot the revelation he had had when Bo was juggling. So powerful was this lesson that years later Jonas would lay it like a keel under his ambitious television series. And it was the threat to this essential premise which Jonas had in mind as he sat opposite Marie H. – looking, you might say, down the barrels of the guns on a battleship – in a café on the Rossio in Lisbon. He had all twenty-odd programmes planned out in minutest detail, not least the links between them, the wide-ranging network of cross-
references
. If the NRK management, which is to say: Marie H., ordered him to call a halt now, halfway, it would not only mean that the series as a whole would be ruined, that viewers would miss experiencing the magical effect produced when snippets from all of the programmes were borne in mind at the same time – it would also cause the twelve partially completed programmes to fall out of Jonas’s hands. The management did not understand the motivation behind his concept, the truly original, challenging aspect of it. They simply could not grasp the idea of a unified whole. Nor that the potential existed for unimagined wholes. Loose, crazy, tentative, but intriguing schemes. Jonas was afraid that
no one
today appreciated the idea of an alternative whole. But that was what he had to offer – to offer NRK and the viewers. A whole that only art could produce. A whole so valuable that it could not be measured in terms of money. Half the programmes would only give half a whole. It would be like seeing only one side of the disc on Bo Wang Lee’s chain. A lot of meaningless symbols spinning in mid-air.

Jonas was exaggerating. He knew that a few of the individual programmes would be good. And it was not as if they could be sure of selling the entire series to every foreign television station that had expressed an interest. But the main endeavour, the possibly quite brilliant concept behind the work would come to nothing. The result would not be revolutionary television, in the sense that it changed lives, changed people, opened them out. No one can blame Jonas Wergeland for feeling frustrated. It
was
tough, it
was
unbearable
to think that this magnificent and utterly original project was in danger of being cancelled by blinkered bureaucrats who did nothing but count the money and pore over administrative jigsaw puzzles; people who lacked the ability to see that, strange though it seemed, it was even possible for out-
and-out
‘individualists’ to break onto the scene in Norway, and who were therefore also incapable of cutting the crap, making an exception,
investing
, in order to ensure a fertile environment for such rare individuals. There was – there is no getting away from it – also a
Festung Norwegen
within the arts, a cultural Norway which preferred to remain isolated, in all ways.

Jonas knew, however, that despite her battleship bearing, Marie H. was not an anti-visionary bureaucrat, she was among other things a poet. Therein lay his hope. Only she had the power to quash all the other second-rate and to some extent envious programming controllers. Jonas searched frantically for words, for arguments, that might sway the woman sitting across from him, almost wished he had a bowl of oranges handy; he sat at a café table on the Rossio and knew that he had come to a milestone in his life – whatever the outcome. She did not seem all that interested, did not even look at him, but began to leaf absent-mindedly through her book. For Jonas this was an intolerable situation. Like having to turn back just as one sighted a cape, the sea route to a new continent. He had written a long and impassioned report to Marie H., explained the grand artistic concept, the overall structure and the threads linking the programmes to one another. His appeal was turned down. And as if that wasn’t enough, when he looked across the desk in her office at Marienlyst, he noticed that she had also corrected his language, that several sentences were marred by red squiggles. It was like writing an ardent love letter in which you bared your soul, only to have the recipient proceed to correct your spelling.

Jonas looked up at the forest of television aerials rising over the jumble of tiled roofs on the hillside behind the theatre. Not that long ago Norway too had been covered with aerials like that. This sight was a comfort to him, an indication of the many people who were waiting to receive his signals, his series. All the more reason then that the project should not be amputated, left half-done, like so much else in Norway.

‘Did you really come all this way to try to make me change my mind?’ She glanced up from her book. In her eyes he saw laughter and disbelief.

‘I honestly had no idea you were here,’ Jonas said. Then said it again. He may have said it once too often. She was still eyeing him doubtfully. ‘I’m here on holiday. Or rather, ever since I studied architecture I’ve wanted to have a look at the weird Manueline architecture. I often visit cities to look at the buildings.’

She picked up his yellow notebook, as if thinking to catch him in a lie. She studied the sketch of the ornate fountain in the square in front of them. He knew it was good. She raised her eyebrows, genuinely impressed. Or as a sign that he had been accepted.

‘You’ll be going to see the Hieronymite Monastery and the Tower of Belém, then?’ she said. ‘We could go together if you like?’

He nodded, inwardly exulting, but managing to keep a straight face. She was going out to dinner, had to take a train to Sintra from the Rossio station, just around the corner. She had friends who lived out there among the
eucalyptus
trees, the ruins of Moorish castles and old palaces. But she would be back the following day. They arranged to meet outside the monastery, fixed a time.

That evening he roamed desultorily through the narrow streets of the Bairro Alto, one of Lisbon’s two hills. The strains of commercialised, almost caricatured versions of wistful
fado
songs drifted out of doorways here and there, but could not entice him in. In any case he was not feeling at all
melancholy
, he felt hopeful. He ran his fingers over the glazed ceramic tiles on the walls of the houses. He liked this proof that by repeating the pattern in one tile you could turn a large flat surface into a work of wonder. While at the same time nullifying the flatness. Now that,
that
was how he envisaged his television series: as a string of almost identical programmes which, when set side by side, would create an optical illusion. A form of infinity.
Māyā
.

He rounded off his stroll with a trip on the old street lifts, the mini Eiffel Towers in the Chiado district. Rode up and down like a kid. He thought about the next day. Things could go up or down. He wondered – possibly because she was a poet – whether there had been a message in the last thing she had said before leaving the café: ‘Remember, television is bad for you.’

After a period of youthful scepticism, Jonas had gradually come to accept the more dubious aspects of television. But only after his own television career was at an end did he find conclusive proof, in the strange story of Viktor Harlem, that TV viewing, even when taken to the extreme, was not necessarily the evil which certain prophets of doom made it out to be.

Viktor Harlem was one of those who died young. During the spring term
of his third year at high school, as he was poised, so to speak, on the last step of the school stairway, all set to stride out onto what everyone predicted would be a gilt-edged path, Viktor was hit on the head by a block of ice – as improbable as it was heavy – which fell off a roof as he was walking along a street in Lillehammer arm in arm with Jonas and Axel, at about the same moment as, amid gales of laughter, they were pronouncing him outright winner of the contest to see who could sing ‘I was Born Under A
Wandering
Star’ in the deepest voice. Viktor was in a coma for a week, but when he regained consciousness he was still not really there. With the minimum of help he was capable of dressing himself, eating or walking about a bit, all in a mechanical, abstracted fashion, but he was, nonetheless, quite helpless. Jonas was afraid that Viktor had finally succeeded in doing what he had striven to do all through high school: to deconstruct everything – the only problem was that he had done it to himself. All of Viktor’s individual components were intact, but they weren’t connecting, they weren’t working as a whole. There was nothing for it but to put him in an institution.