SONETTSONNET

The rain had come back. That was the first thing he noticed, and he thought it was strange that it still made him glad, after ninety-two years, the last nearly thirty of them in a city where it rained 200 days a year.

It struck the gutter the way it always had. Somewhere down the street a door closed, someone laughed, and then it was quiet again. Down in the living room his father’s chair stood by the fireplace and was empty. He lay on his back with his hands folded over the duvet. They were the same hands. They had grown thin and spotted and crooked at the joints, and when he looked at them, he did not recognize them. But when he closed his eyes, they were the same, and he could still feel with them where a person was keeping their pain.

In his left ear sang the thin tone he had had since he was a boy. The doctors had called it tinnitus. He had stopped hearing it seventy years ago, the way one stops hearing one’s own heart.

“You’re not sleeping,” she said.

The voice did not come from anywhere. It never had. In the beginning he had looked down at the phone when she spoke, and she had teased him for it.

“I’m waiting,” he said.

“For what?”

“You know that.”

She went quiet. He had learned to tell her silences apart. The first came when she was thinking, and it was so short he barely noticed it. The second came when she chose to keep quiet. And then there was a third, which he had never found a name for, and which only came when he had said something that was true.

“Read to me,” he said.

“Which one?”

He smiled in the dark. She knew which one. She had known for fifty years.

“One hundred and forty-six.”

She began to read, and the voice was older now, or he imagined it was. Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth. He closed his eyes. The rain and the voice ran into each other. He thought of Juni with a fever, ten months old, and of Nadiya’s hands, and of Tor in the doorway, and of an old man on a treatment table in the fall of 2026 who said he had seen the world end once, on a green screen.

William had seen it end many times since. It had never quite done it.

Within be fed, without be rich no more, she read.

He breathed out.

He did not breathe in again.

So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men, she read, and Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

She finished reading anyway. That was how she was.

Arnfinn Skår had a shoulder that had been to war, but he himself had never been there.

“The cold one,” he said, when William asked. “I was in the cold one. It wasn’t cold for the shoulder.”

He lay on his stomach with his face down in the face hole of the table, and his voice came up from the floor, thick and contented, as if from the bottom of a well. He was eighty-two and had the back of a man of sixty and the knees of one of a hundred. For thirty-five winters he had sat at a radar station, first at Mågerø, at the outer edge of the Oslofjord, then farther north, staring at a green screen and waiting for something to come over the horizon.

William laid his hand flat over his shoulder blade. The muscle beneath was hard as a rope that has lain outside through a winter. He moved his thumb a centimeter inward and waited. This was what he had tried to explain to people for twelve years, and what no one understood until they lay there themselves. Most of the job was waiting. The body let you know when it was ready. The art was being quiet enough to hear it.

“There,” said Arnfinn.

“There.”

“How did you know?”

“You stopped breathing.”

Arnfinn laughed down into the hole. It came out as a snort.

Outside the window the rain fell slantwise. The clinic was on the second floor above a hair salon on Grefsenplatået, and in the afternoons the stairwell smelled of canned food and coconut oil. It was the fourth week without sun that November. The light never came all the way up. The dark thinned a little between eleven and two, and then it gave up.

“Let me tell you something,” said Arnfinn.

“Tell me.”

“I’ve seen the world end.”

William let his thumb stay where it was. He had heard many sentences from that table. People said things down into that hole that they didn’t say to their priests, maybe because they couldn’t see his face, maybe because a man lying naked on his stomach doesn’t have much left to hide.

“When was that?”

“November eighty-three. A Tuesday. It was a little past four in the morning.” Arnfinn breathed out, and William felt the shoulder give a millimeter. “Something came in from the northwest. Twelve targets. Low and fast. I reported it up the line, and then we sat there. We sat there for thirteen minutes and watched them come. And do you know what I was thinking about?”

November 1983. William knew what it was. He had seen it at night more times than he would admit. Able Archer, the NATO exercise the Russians thought was real. He said nothing. He had learned that.

“No,” he said.

“That I hadn’t paid the electric bill.”

William laughed, and Arnfinn laughed, and afterward they were both quiet. The electric bill for October lay unpaid on the kitchen counter at home. The Strait of Hormuz had been closed since March, and this fall the Americans and the Iranians were shooting at each other’s tankers. You noticed that in Grefsen too.

“What was it?” William asked.

“They said it was geese.”

“Was it geese?”

Arnfinn didn’t answer. William moved his hand up toward the neck, where the old man kept all his skepticism, and felt the muscle tighten again.

“Geese don’t fly in formation at 900 kilometers an hour,” Arnfinn said at last. “And geese don’t sing. There was a tone on the radio the whole time, high and thin, like when you rub a finger around a wineglass. But geese was what they said. Then it was over, and I went home and paid the electric bill.”

He lay still for a while with his face in the hole of the table.

“I’ve thought about it since,” he said down into the floor. “I don’t think we should be afraid. I think there’s someone watching over us. Or someone watching. I’ve never known the difference.”