I skim through the notebook in search of a particular date:
October 11, 1986.
Cycled home from school. On my way to Silfurtún, I see Reagan and Gorbachev on the steps of Höfdi House. They’re both wearing coats, one a trench coat and the other with a furry collar. There were also three geese in the field. I saw them on TV that night, in black and white, like sand and a glacier. Then I wrote and underlined the words: I was there.
A day later I wrote on the same page:
October 12. Dad is dead.
The world is not the same.
I extend my life by three days and borrow Svanur’s trailer to empty the basement.
I take three trips up to the apartment, one with the stool, another with the record player, and the final one with the cardboard box marked THROW AWAY.
The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly
I peep into the fridge to see what’s there: two eggs in a carton marked “from our most experienced hens.” In the cupboard there is a packet of fusilli pasta, how long should they be boiled, don’t they tend to swell up? On the windowsill there’s a parsley plant that I’ve been trying to keep alive, mostly withered now. I scramble the eggs and clip the green stems over the pan.
While the pasta is boiling, I peruse the last pages in the graph paper diary.
One entry stands out, due to its length, three whole pages of uninterrupted text. I seem to be describing a mountain climb and I have added an underlined title, as if it were a short story: Climbing the steps of the initiation temple. According to the date it’s June the seventh and I’m not travelling alone because the entry opens with: G asked to come along.
Borrowed the Subaru from Mom after choir practice (broken exhaust pipe). Have had my eye on this mountain for some time (longer than on G). Have slept with four girls in the choir and morale is low. The choirmaster (a friend of Mom’s) pulled me aside and told me the tension was affecting the voices.
I seem to make amends by inviting the fifth girl on a drive and mountain hike.
G was wearing a yellow turtleneck and white sneakers.
And, as usual, I detail the shopping list: On the way we stopped at a shop and I bought prawn salad sandwiches, two Cokes, and two Prince Polo chocolate bars.
In the car on the way to the crater I tell G that Dad died this winter and that I dropped out of school to take over the family company, Steel Legs Ltd. I tell her that I live with Mom and have one older brother. I also tell her I intend to become a father one day. (Why did I say that? I felt I had to say that.) I tell her about some of the things that have happened in the past and also more recently, which explain my way of thinking and feeling today. This is followed by a sentence that I’ve underlined twice: I spoke and G was silent.
Then there are five lines of text that I scribbled over and that are totally illegible until the mountain reappears:
G started to betray doubts when she saw the mountain rise above us and all the rocks. I walked ahead and she followed in my footsteps and I could feel her breath on my neck. It was foggy and difficult to find the top rock. We waited for the mist to clear so that I could offer G a glimpse of the glacier to the east. We did it on the way back. It had rained and the moss was wet and we didn’t take off any more clothes than necessary. It was slightly more complicated for her because she was wearing some kind of dungarees. I heard the flutter of a ptarmigan nearby and thought: What does a bird see, what does a bird think? A sheep was suddenly standing beside us and staring and I told G to close her eyes.
And I thought, what does a sheep see, what does a sheep think? As we were putting our clothes back on, G said, “Imagine if an eruption were to start underneath us.”
On the way back to the car, we took a shortcut across an arctic tern nesting area.
Thousands of arctic terns.
A choir of a thousand voices.
There I threw up my prawn salad sandwich.
Because I was feeling weak, G offered to drive back into town and I lay on the backseat. G talked and I was silent. She told me about her mother and her nursing course and how difficult it was to find a good vein to stick a needle into. On the way she stopped the car on one occasion and explained that there were some young ptarmigans on the road.
Then the account peters out. I’m at the bottom of the mountain again. Or that’s what it says in clear letters: I’ve reached the foot of the mountain. I turn the page and the next entry is a month later, when I visit G.
July 7.
Met G again at her and her mother’s home. Saw her completely naked for the first time (not just in portions). It was impossible to lock the bedroom door so I had to drag a chest of drawers
