A Handy Stone
by Kjetil Jansen
Pacing my living room at 0617 while my phone was charging, I told my knee not to act up. This was and had long been the day, a mental red circle around the last Sunday of April. My first real walk without crutches, a taste of what had been and will be again.
I decided to be bold and head for the base of Ulriken Mountain. Forty minutes at the most. Almost no nature involved, only streets and a four-hundred meter stretch of rough stone path turning steep at the end.
Four years ago, I did another street walk on an early Sunday morning. The city of Bergen, Norway sleeps in on weekends, and I was walking through deserted streets, thinking about this desertion: even the dog-owners are getting lazier and lazier. Then I felt something was wrong in a deep way I seldom feel. Later, I read a house fire had been discovered twenty minutes after my passing. It didn’t do much damage, and logic tells me it was probably not detectable at that stage.
Even so, I did become more alert and vigilant on my walks during the precious few months when early walks are enjoyable and bright and not cold, as this walk promised to be, because there is no sun for hours in the shadow of this mountain. The anticipation of mental red-circle day had not dulled this alertness per se, but a constant premonition is not a real premonition, and cellphones that are charging are born to be forgotten.
The isolated hillside path goes from a residential area to a road near the entrance to Ulriken Funicular and was a part of a trail system before the town hospital began to expand any which way it could. At that stage of my recovery, I pined for the top of Ulriken, but the gondola cable car was closed because they were replacing the old masts with larger ones and the two gondolas with larger ones.
0653 mental time, I told my left knee. Please, please do not act up!. 0653 mental time because I did manage to forget my phone, and I had a dead girl on my hands. I don’t like to leave my phone charging, because I don’t trust chargers and their tiny wires. A girl at 0653, give or take, face down on the deserted path. Not drunk face down; dead face down. Found by a cripple: a middle-aged man with no phone and no crutches and who would have been of little or no help to her if she had been only nearly dead.
She was not on the path but beside it, in what would be tall grass a few weeks later, in front of a metal door. I believe the door must have something to do with the electric power plant on the top of the hill. She had a purple jacket halfway on, and her blue jeans were down around her feet, and her neck was very cold. Her hair was brown, her jacket covered her but not in a comforting position.
I looked at the girl again and thought, Phone and Don’t touch her. I had touched her neck to check for pulse until I noticed the blue mark under my thumb. And to check for phone. But no more. It was mental past seven, and I felt stupid after failing to notice the blue mark at once. I tried to calm down, because there was no hurry other than to prevent others seeing the body and mess up the crime scene and maybe mess up their lives and, if I had a phone, I could stay right here, but I must leave her and get to a phone, because I had to do something more than just stand around and wait.
Yes, my knee was acting up, but that was because I was afraid it would fail me, and that was not an option. I headed back in the direction of the residential area. Houses down on the right, an apartment complex nailed to the hill on the left. Some lights on, but they were not necessarily up-and-about lights. The path was now a road, but it only served the path and a couple of garages and ended where another road did a sharp turn decorated by a stone wall. I heard voices coming from behind the turn. They were tired and sullen voices, but I was going to wake them up.
They came into view. A man and a woman in their early twenties.
“Do you have a phone?” I asked.
Their faces were also tired and sullen and grey in the dim morning light, and they didn’t react or slow down, and they looked at me in the way you do when you search for something to say to put someone down.
“Don’t you have a phone?” the man asked. It was meant as an insult, a middle-aged man out in the morning who doesn’t know the names of the latest computer games and doesn’t own the latest phone or maybe no phone at all. The man looked at me in a “I have spoken” way, and the woman searched for something to say to back him up.
They looked like a brother and sister, but that was because they were tired and sullen. Probably a couple. They kept walking. I got closer. The woman whispered a sentence with “gimp” in the middle, said louder than the rest of the sentence, she had found her insult.
“Have you been to a party?” I asked.
They didn’t answer.
“There is a dead girl on the path up here. Maybe you know her.”
They finally stopped walking. They looked at each other. “Dead girl?” the woman said, a little swayed, but not yet committed. “Are you a prankster?”
The man snickered. “Are you a prankster, old man? A young girl on the Net and a man who wanders the streets at nights, hoping to catch a party.”
The woman wanted in. “Or to catch prey, a girl walking home alone. Spring nights can be pretty cold, my dear, come home with me for a nice little cocoa. Not kidding, that was what he said, that old man two weeks ago who talked to Sara, you know.”
While they kept talking as others argue, I looked around. That party, where is it? Others leaving, others who are not in a state of drunk where you are coming down in a bad way and you stayed up a bit longer to avoid hangover and failed.
“Maybe he killed her,” said the man.
“That old man who talked to Sara?”
“No. This man. He kills the girl, she hurt him, he limps away, sees us, pretends he found her.”
The woman produced a phone. A phone. The man looked at her as if he wanted to snatch it from her. “Who are you calling?”
“Don’t brown your pants. I am texting Ingrid to see if she’s safe.”
“We need to see this body,” the man proclaimed.
“This girl has dark brown hair,” I said. “Was Ingrid at your party? When did she leave?”
“So very concerned. Take us to the body, killer.”
“I would rather prefer to keep you out of it.”
“I bet you do.” The man, moving low as with a headache, approached a garden where they were building something. Stones removed and piled. He picked up a large round one.
“Lars, what are you doing?”
“Oldie wants to kill us, too. Look at him. He thinks, ‘Die, die, die.’ We need a weapon.”
“He might have a knife.”
“I hope he does. Come at me any time you want.”
“I don’t have a knife, and I didn’t kill her.” I looked around. Party people. No, no more party people. Night shift worker, not lazy dog-owner, anyone.
“Show us the body, Oldie,” Lars ordered in an “I can handle everything” voice.
I led the way. Lars pretended to the woman’s amusement the stone was a bowling ball and discovered it was too large for one hand. He mumbled something about a defect bowling pin. That was supposed to be me.
The woman caught up with me. She was silent for a pregnant moment. “She left two hours ago, Ingrid did. She hasn’t answered me and she has brown hair.”
“Did she have a purple jacket?”
“No, she didn’t.”
I looked her in the eye. “It’s not her.”
She fell back. We entered the path. I became less sure that it wasn’t her. Jackets travel. Electric door. In a flash, I imagined the body gone or never was. I imagined wrong. Pitiful, her short grass bed.
“I wouldn’t touch her, if I were you.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Lars said. “It’s a dead girl all right.” He put his arm around the woman, who had covered her face with her hands but was unable to cover her eyes. She stared unblinkingly.
Lars put down the stone and reached for his back pocket. A phone. “Make the call,” I said.
He pointed the phone at me. “First, I want to hear your confession.”
“I have nothing to confess.”
It was a standstill. The woman sniffled.
“Stop showing off to your girlfriend and make the call.”
The woman dried her nose and touched his shoulder at the sound of “girlfriend.”
“I decide when to call and when not to call.”
“The jacket,” the woman said. “She was at the party. I talked to her. I have a photo with her in it. Here it is.” She showed me her phone. A patch of purple.
She looked at me. “I think you are right,” said Lars. “And she left rather early.”
“Did you take more pictures?” I asked.
“I did,” she said. Her eyes lighted up. “Maybe we can see the one who murdered her.”
Lars scoffed. “The murderer is standing right in front of us.”
“You took pictures!” she said and snapped his phone from his hand somewhat teasingly. She backstepped, as if doing a parody of a jealous girlfriend.
She moved and scrolled too quickly for him to catch her. “Yes. There’s Ingrid. Ingrid’s cleavage.” She laughed. “Here she is. Here she is outside.” She stared at the electric door and let the phone fall to her side. “Oh.”
Lars pushed her to the ground. As she scrambled, he placed a heavy boot on her stomach and grabbed her right foot. He twisted her ankle. It broke. I said “No!” under her scream.
“We will talk later,” he said as he did the same to her left foot.
Lars picked up the phones. “Now,” he said.
I wanted to flee as much as I wanted to stay. He picked up the stone with a wild grunt. My feet moved on their own accord, further down the path which soon would be up the path. Way downhill, a hospital building. A research facility, certainly not open. Too steep, can’t afford to fall because of the part of my body I should not think about but now I’ve done it, and it’s back.
We were in the steep part and this not a path they fix. Loose stones and pebbles and roots to stumble upon. The pain had developed tendrils and I looked back. He was getting closer; he carried the stone with a smile. Smash smash, die die. I wanted to talk to him and say give up and this has gone too far, but if I do stop and talk, he will understand the stone is stupid if he wants to catch me.
Perhaps at that point he didn’t really want to catch me, he wanted to bring me away from her and a decision about her: what is she doing, broken and waiting to talk later or broken and crawling and already found by someone who always brings his or her phone. Or it is a game? He is a gamer, I think; everybody under forty is a gamer, and he has found this weapon, and this is the weapon he must use to take me out of the game.
Path became road. No people. What is wrong with you people? When does the cable car open? I forgot for a moment it was closed and put my mental clock away. A kindergarten was obviously closed, and a large and yellow apartment building standing behind it appeared to be still in lazy-weekend mode. Some people must be up, preparing breakfast, charging their phones, blithely ignoring their bladder-heavy dogs.
Road upwards: there are nurse student homes, ordinary homes, mountain trails. Road down: there are ordinary homes but first stairs between rows of more research hospital buildings. Sometimes up is easier than down for knees, but not this knee, and down, down, down is the real hospital.
The first set of stairs is short and narrow. I listened, and he was still there. Why wouldn’t he be? I am at least taking him away from her, the living girl in the soon to be long grass which the dead one will never see and the living girl will never see because she will live and not come back to see for years and maybe the grass will be there but not the same grass. In a way, it is.
Then a long set of stairs. Raw thick unpainted wood, not built to be a permanent feature, but it had been here for years, as a building project that never ends. My knee sagged, and the pain was numbing, and you can think pain is just an illusion only for so long. I didn’t hear something whistle through the air, I didn’t feel something that made me turn around, I heard the crash, a foot behind me. The gamer, the bowler, his shot, his throw. The stone had cut a step pretty much in half.
Lars grinned. “Ha-ha, old man, I’m coming for you.” He bent down to snatch the long piece of step as if this had been his plan all along.
I backed slowly. Lars was endgame close, too close to run. He had dropped the stone, and I could talk to him, but there was no point, he had a less stupid weapon he was never going to drop; the stone at this point was out of his game, but guess again. Not perfectly round but round enough.
The step piece removal brought it back: the bowler became the bowling pin and, as he aimed to strike me down, the stone hit his ankle at the worst and best place possible. I grabbed the plank and... where to strike? His shoulder? Wait; his clavicle bone: the only bone I’ve ever broken, myself, and long may that continue.
He shrieked with pain, and I ran and limped and looked back. He was crawling back up the stairs, and he was getting faster, and my mental clock said: Hey did you miss me I am so sorry baby I will be away for a while unless I kill you and blame it on that old man who killed my baby and earlier the other girl yes officer from the same party and I chased him with a stone can you believe it I was out of my mind with despair.
He had his good hand on the raw and thick handrail, and I smashed down on his upper arm and again and again fracturing all the way down including his fingers. One of his phones beeped, it was probably Ingrid. I felt not good about myself, and I felt very good about myself when it came his time to scream, “Bitch!” And he was still moving but was down to a directionless crawl, and I dropped the plank, and it hit the now stoneless stairs. And just one more hospital building to run and limp along to, a real hospital building with an emergency entrance and a counter and phones and people who save injured girls and oldies as they occur in not mental time.
The sight of the emergency entrance stung my brain and my knee, and I thought, Hold your horses, he is still crawling and I could pass out and welcome back we operated on your knee for hours and hours and hours and you are going to be just fine. What girl? We found two dead girls. Please be specific.
A flash of sirens. An ambulance drove up and stopped beside me. It could be her. What about that, and wouldn’t you know it: anecdote ending beckoned. It was not her on the gurney, it was a young boy who asked about his face with severe burns on his hands, and his face lacked eyebrows, and it was red but not burnt. He kept asking, “My face, my face?” His helpers didn’t answer; they acted.
I limped through automatic doors. The floor had a red line to counter. Everybody will flock around the burnt boy, ignoring me. “Don’t come around here babbling about dead and wounded girls; we have work to do.” Some flocked, others didn’t. I followed the red line to the counter. On the wall was a real time clock, and I talked and I talked, and they had phones, they had phones.
Copyright © 2021 by Kjetil Jansen
