Present Tense Machine by Gunnhild Øyehaug

Author:Gunnhild Øyehaug
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Sara orders octopus in the small restaurant in Monterey, Bård orders grilled chicken. Going to the aquarium almost makes you want to be a vegetarian, Bård says. I can’t order octopus having just seen an octopus hide in the corner of a tank as though he were trying not to get caught, Bård says, and pulls his shoulders up to his ears, pretending to be an octopus cowering in a corner. So you order chicken instead, Sara says, and laughs. You can be pretty certain that your chicken ran around squawking with fear when it realized it was going to be caught. Bård looks down at his chicken breast. It has been cut into thin slices, with a shell of crispy skin, fat, and spices. They have spent one night in San Francisco, hired a car, and driven along the coast to Monterey. There was a large oblong room in the aquarium with a floor-to-ceiling glass wall out toward the ocean. A strip of sand had been built up by the window, with water and natural vegetation. Sandpipers hopped around in the sand, sometimes lifting to fly a few meters over their miniature world and then land again. Outside, the Pacific Ocean broke on the shore. The light was warm and golden, like amber, the water was a light grayish blue. There were swinging doors at either end of the room. A sign on the wall explained that all the birds had come to the aquarium with injuries, and none had been born in captivity. Bård stood as though hypnotized and stared at the constructed world with real birds and sand and water, it was as though someone had succeeded entirely in creating an illusion of the truth, but at the same time had shown that it wasn’t true, because the real world could be seen beyond the glass wall, the real ocean and real sand, and Bård doesn’t know that in both versions of that moment, where in one universe he’s father to Laura and has forgotten that Anna exists, that a child must always have a mother, and in the other universe he’s Anna’s ex-husband and they’ve both forgotten that they’ve lost Laura, he would ponder this fuzziness that he can’t quite grasp, that accompanies him every day, like an insistent empty space, like a shadow without a shadow. But in both universes, it is the sight of a sandpiper suddenly flying up from a corner of the miniature world that triggers the thought. Sara notices in both universes. She notices when what she calls “the missing” takes hold of him. One doesn’t always need to know what it is, Sara says. Just that one’s missing something, that something is absent. When she notices it, she leaves him in peace, or gives his arm a light caress. I’m going to get fat, Sara says with a sigh as she pops the fried octopus rings in her mouth. I’m going to get enormously fat. Bård says that he’s never heard about anyone getting fat from eating octopus.

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