“Yet, strangely, I’m not hungry.”
“I’m making American-style home fries in your honor. Potatoes, onions, and garlic I grew myself. You can eat or abstain, as you wish.”
“Sounds good.”
“Lila, lie down.” She does exactly as he says, curling up on a rag rug under the ladder. He starts fetching, chopping, juggling, whistling, all-around bustling, while she continues to work on her diagram. The figure involves a lot of lines and she is just now realizing she should make it bigger. She sets the sheet aside, gets tape from her pack and connects four new sheets so that they form a 17” by 22” rectangle. Returns to work. A few minutes go by during which an ignorant observer who likes nothing better than to jump to conclusions might think, Here’s a happy family.
“Food’s ready,” the old man announces.
“Dig in,” she says, not looking up.
“Could you move that while we eat?”
As before, he doesn’t seem interested in what she’s doing. Which is fine with her. But it’s kind of strange that he never asks anything.
She sees that she needs to move the large sheet to make enough room, even if he eats alone, and besides, the thought of him getting grease on her diagram is intolerable, so she folds it and places it on top of her pack by the door. Lila gives her a look and the last half inch of her tail wriggles. When Mette returns to the table she sees that he’s put a plate down for her. “Just in case. You want a beer?”
“No thanks.”
“It’s home-brewed.”
“No thanks.”
“It’s your funeral.” He starts eating.
She realizes that, in part, she is just trying to bother him. This makes her feel petty and foolish. Worse, maybe he can tell. In fact, she is somewhat hungry and the home fries smell good. “I guess I’ll try some,” she says.
He swivels the handle of the serving spoon toward her. He also pours beer into her glass.
His home fries are excellent. The beer probably is as well, but she has this crazy feeling that if she drinks it, he will have captured her soul.
He eats and drinks while she nibbles, and that same ignorant observer would see a kindly old miller and his socially normal granddaughter sharing silent rapport of a winter evening.
“So you’ve never felt that you don’t belong anywhere?” Mette asks.
“Belonging is for ungulates.”
“And you’re a leopard.”
“I’m a man.”
“Humans are gregarious.”
“Human gregariousness is a holdover from chimpanzees, whose idea of socializing is to form tribes and kill outsiders. Predators like leopards are solitary by nature. The glory of humans is that they can choose to leave the herd.”
“This sounds Ayn Rand-ish.”
“Please. Have you read any Ayn Rand? She was a neurotic nitwit. She wanted to feel superior to other people, which is just gregariousness for megalomaniacs.”
In fact, she hasn’t read any Ayn Rand. Of course, maybe he hasn’t, either. “Yet you were a guru in a commune.”
“Which was a mistake. I wanted to inspire people, and I only made them weaker. Which made me feel like I deserved punishment, which made me stick a sword in my stomach, which was also a mistake, and now we’ve come full circle and proved to your satisfaction that I’m fallible.”
He clears the table and washes up. He’s so efficient, it doesn’t occur to her to offer help, and he seems neither to expect nor want it. She brings her parhexagon diagram back to the table and finishes constructing it. She starts labeling equal line segments, congruent and supplementary angles. Drying his hands on a dish towel, he stands over her. “The only meaning your life will ever have is the one you give it. So you’re all alone. Boo hoo! Everyone is alone. Most people don’t figure that out until they’re on their deathbeds, but you’ve been having fun making up your bed ahead of time, so if you don’t go swimming tomorrow morning maybe you’ll come out of this with a chance of leading a full and free life.” He hangs the dish towel on a rack on the side of the countertop cupboard. “It’s ten-thirty. I’m going to bed. If you get hungry, eat anything you see.” Lila lifts her head, half rises. He puts out a palm and she lies back down. He lifts the lid of the storage chest beneath the west window and pulls out a bedroll and a pillow. “Pad, clean sheets, blanket. Roll it out when you want.” He goes out to the toilet, returns, brushes his teeth at the sink. “Stay up as long as you want. One last piece of advice, though. A decision to kill yourself when you’re tired is no proper decision at all.”
“Pathetic fallacy, got it.”
He turns to Lila and she jumps into his arms. He starts up the ladder one-handed. “She used to be able to manage this on her own, but she’s getting old. Good night.” He disappears through the ceiling.
She spends a while staring at her diagram. Either it’s a harder problem than she thought, or she’s tired. As he suggested. Fuck, once again he put an idea in her head that squats and propagates. She works for another half an hour just to spite him, but really, she’s getting nowhere. She couldn’t get to sleep in the Copenhagen hotel last night until four, because she was still on Seattle time. Now it’s all crashing down on her, the three-day bus ride, the chain of flights, the bad night, the train, the ferry, the old man’s symposium. She doesn’t bother to brush her teeth. Unrolls the pad on the floor near the south window and turns out the light. Crawls between the sheets with her clothes on. Stares at the ceiling.
She listens to the creaking of the mill shaft, the sighing of the wind. Silence from the ice, silence from upstairs. From her position on the floor, all she can see out the window are the dark clouds, occulted every four seconds by the tip of a sail sweeping past.
