A corner is turned and VENKE, TERESE and the egg are in a living room, where their eyesight gradually adjusts to the dim lighting. The room is almost empty, with panelled walls and faint shadows of old-fashioned summer furniture in the corner. Along one wall you can just make out the remains of a fireplace, but where the flue should be is a patch of black, blurred mass, framed by dirt and polystyrene packaging painted black.
The rest of the girls, all those who appeared earlier in the story, have returned and are standing in the middle of the room, spread out around a chalk circle on the wooden floor. They look up and smile softly, and VENKE and TERESE smile back, as if they’ve all been waiting for each other.
The egg is heavy in VENKE’s and TERESE’s hands as they transport it into the room, past the other girls, who stand just outside of the chalked circle that divides the dark wood flooring, making an inside and an outside. Then the other girls are allowed to hold the egg, one after the other. The egg is passed between hands and through the room; it’s constantly moving, floating along the perimeter of the circle, recognising its own shape and the five-pronged pentagram that’s sketched inside the circle. It is weighed and caressed, floating through the room on a sea of fingers and skin. The egg moulds itself around each girl’s body, and then it takes the bodies with it, lures them and beckons them further into the circle.
We watch the living room gradually brighten, and in the black webbing where the stairway should have been, we spot a small crevice that slowly begins to resemble a rotten orifice with shrivelled labia. A little loosened webbing has congealed on the edges. The light is still faint and casts numerous shadows of windowsills, planks and furniture, but a light like a UV light or a tanning salon bulb shines on the web and the opening.
The egg is in the middle of the circle. It floats along past the shapes. The music has become deafening, threatening the eardrums. Windowpanes vibrate. The shell’s surface temperature rises.
The boiler is seething, the modem for the cosmic internet. Imitation smoke, which might be from a fire or a smoke machine, flows across the living room floor, and seeps in and out of the hole, as if, on the other side, a fire is breathing or someone is smoking a cigarette.
TERESE’s and VENKE’s hands are visible in the picture. The egg floats in their hands, or just above their hands.
With a lot of hubbub, the hands thrust the egg into the orifice.
The black labia slowly widen as the opening is enlarged.
The girls push themselves, head first, through the opening.
3
THE EGG
Let me see …
At first the darkness is all consuming and boundaries are insignificant. We don’t know if we see out of or into our own bodies. We don’t know if we’re at one with everything, or if we’re buried alive. Then we spot a few edges, shifting, or contours that gleam in light from an unknown source, or perhaps from the whites of our own eyes. The contours hurl themselves at us, forming geometric patterns through the dark, like a knife carving secret signs into black paper. We stretch our eyes into the patterns and see a brighter spot in the distance, above us. We get the feeling that we’re underneath something, that above us there’s a surface. With fingers and arms and legs we kick off to get up and out of the dark. It’s the same movement: legs that kick off from underwater to rise up, and fingers pinched and flicked open across a screen or a touchpad to zoom out.
We zoom out. We’re now in a digitised class photo. Behind the lined-up students is a vague background, that kind of generic wallpaper that’s always put up for the backdrop of school photos – blue with cotton-white clouds, as if all the teens who have ever gone to school were angels in heaven … The room constructed in this photo has minimal content, little depth, and no sense of time. It’s a room that denies us comfort, that doesn’t let us be ourselves, as we’ve defined ourselves. The room makes room for something else, something flat, finalised and arranged, conventional. The students, the teacher, every item of clothing, the glasses and jewellery, all personal characteristics, everything is interchangeable. Every class photo could be any class photo.
The class photo, as photographic reproduction and genre, doesn’t care about the teens in the photo. It doesn’t depict who’s had sex, or who would’ve had sex if they’d had the opportunity. It doesn’t care about who speaks in tongues, who sings in metal bands, or who will march with the Nordic Resistance Movement twenty years later. The high-resolution bitmap graphics split people up into tiny little points, reproduce pimples and moles with supreme accuracy, but at the same time ignore us entirely as individuals, as sinners, as moral, judgemental and doomed beings. The image doesn’t give a flaming fuck about the students’ souls, or their mortality, or their grace or their misery. The photo says, Even Southerners are points and pigments. The photo speaks matter-of-factly, without magic or blasphemy.
Class 2B, 1998, it says in the bottom right corner, printed with thin white letters, like a stage-prop tombstone, Class 2b were here. There we are, submitting to the systems. We are perfectly arranged, wedged into the institutional pattern. We are evidence, lined up where the church and the school system naturally meet. We smile the wavering smile of conformity.
I’m the black-clad one in the top left corner. Around me are Christian and
