Grave Roses

“Fear not death for the hour of your doom is set, and no one may escape it.” - Ancient Viking saying

“Hey,” I said to a girl in a purple dress.

“Hey,” she said and she took a drag of her cigarette.

“I wanted to ask you for a lighter, but I have one myself,” I said as I lit a Lucky.

She took off her thick golden sunglasses, revealing dark-green mysterious eyes that looked at me with both childlike wonder and mature cautiousness. “You want to talk to me, because I am somebody you might like and found the lighter excuse too transparent. Talk to me, if you’ll bore me, I’ll tell you and then you can stop talking to me. You need no excuse. Talk to me, and if you’re lucky, I might share something in return.”

“I see you watch the trains appear at this station, almost every morning. You seem to watch them appear with no place to go. Whether you enter the train or not has no consequence foreseeable, yet, it would make all the difference. You see the people get out of the train, happy to have arrived and the people go into the train happy to leave. The people who enter the train are going to the place that the people who are moving out of the train were happy to leave. But you, you are standing there, observing them, learning their movements. I saw you stand on one leg once. I saw you practice the Crane. I know what you are.”

“Nice belt,” she said.

“Crocodile leather. I know it was painted but I’d like to fool myself into thinking they breed purple crocodiles for them somewhere.”

“Do you fight like a crocodile?”

“No, not my style. My style is the Dove.”

“What does it do?”

“It wakes.”

“So, your style is waking dove? Is that your own?”

“I wouldn’t be wearing this purple if it wasn’t’’

“Show me a movement.”

I showed her the spinning dove, in which the second enemy gets the blow to the side of the neck, paralyzing the muscle, after killing the first one by shattering the Adam’s apple with the back of my hand. It was my most artistic move, and at the landing, I was proud to not have stepped. Sometimes I step a little at the landing when I’m doing it for showing off. I never miss-step at the graveyard or at my dojo, where I’m alone. But with her eyes upon me, I felt no nerves and did my movement with the perfection it deserved.

“Will you teach me your dove? I will teach you my puma.”

“What does your puma do?”

“It jumps.”

“Well, would miss Jumping Puma have a coffee with mister Waking Dove?”

“Kate.”

“Snooky.”

“That’s a name I’ve never heard before,” she said as we walked towards the crowd before the trains.

“I had to buy it. I hated my old name because I hated my old life, and so, I bought an entirely new name.”

“What’s the name in full?”

“Snooky Breukelair Clüssen.”

“Cool, my last name is Fragmantine.”

“Well,” I said, presenting my hand, “it’s a pleasure to meet you, Kate Fragmantine.”

She put her hand, which had a thin white clove around it, in mine, so I could kiss it during the walk. The purple did not lie, and her walk didn’t either. It was such a pleasure to meet another Kung Fu master. It doesn’t happen too often that you find them, especially not so young as me, by which I mean, not thirty yet.

“So, what makes you so rich to buy a name so expensive?” she asked.

“I make knifes.”

“What kind of knifes?”

“Murder-knifes and hunting-knifes. The murder-knifes I don’t sell but I do handmake what are to be considered by many rich hunters, the best hunting-knifes in the world. What do you do for the money?”

“I’m a Lo Fi hip-hop-artist by heart and enjoy some popularity under the name Killswitch, but since Lo-Fi Hip-Hop is not a genre to make a decent living in as a beat-maker, I make the bread as a fashion designer for Kenzo. I worked at their office for a while until I was unmissable in their T-shirt line division so I could make crazy demands. I make them a blue-print for one T-shirt a month, which is about three days of work, send it via e-mail and I get paid a shit ton of money. I kind of stay somewhere for a month, live in hotels and stand at train stations, watching the people. I’ve been in this crazy Viking-town for about two months now. I think I’ll stay a little while longer in the Bilderberg Hotel until I get bored with it and then I think I might head to Moscow. I have been having a great correspondence with a fellow beat-maker; Grushenka Alexandra, who goes by the name of Carnival Carnage. We might embark on a project together. Hey, do want to have coffee here by the way?”

“You know, I’ve been living here for about two years now and I found this great coffee place by the river called…”

“Little Lucifer’s?!”

“Ahh, you already found out about it!”

“Just found it two days ago. Do you know the fastest way? According to my great feminine navigational system it’s a two-and-a-half hour walk from here, of which a half an hour is urban.”

“If we keep this tempo,” (we were walking about five kilometres an hour and it was about ten kilometres away) “we’ll be there in two hours. My glorious masculine, non-intuitive and very analytic navigational system leads me that way, to the river, and when we reach the river in about ten minutes, all we have to do is follow it upstream.”

“I saw the curve on the map, that the river makes and it seems to me faster to go straight through the forest, where we will see this old forgotten church, that has these wonderful spirits in it, teaching me all about the animals there. The way of the deer is sometimes better than that of the puma. Keeps the blood of your hands. This purple is deep enough my friend, and the puma is not as peaceful as the dove. The art of war is glorious but the art of peace should always be the end of it, and that is, as the catty little kitty-cat I am, a hard art to profess.”

“Well, take me to church then, my little kitty-cat, but let’s go to Lucifer’s first.”

“It is,” she said as she took a beautiful silver pocket-watch out of her Kenzo-purse, which very loudly spelled KENZO, “eleven forty-three in the afternoon. If we go to Lucifer’s following the river, we’ll be at the church around early dusk, depending on how many coffees and scones we’ll have, and then, after I show you some of my puma, we could dine at the Bilderberg. Does that sound like a plan for the day, or do you have knives to produce? I’d love to see them by the way, especially the murder ones. Do people know you make them?”

“Of course not. I don’t want to draw attention,” I said while I showed her the combat knife on my belt, without taking it out of its holster, behind my bright-green tweet jacket.

“Wow,” she said after a quick glance, “but you understand that for my full judgement of your skills, I’d have to hold it.”

“At the church, you can play with my knife darling, at the church.”

“I’m unarmed, just so you know, but I have this thing with axes. As a matter of fact, I came to Norway to find the perfect ax. You look for an ax and you find a knife. Will you give me one of your murder-knives? I promise, it shall only kill those deserving of death. An ax to the head or a knife to the throat, what does it really matter…”

“I have three blank knives, that are all finished except for the engraving. I’ll choose one, and engrave a puma on one side and a deer on the other side. That way, I hope to motivate your ethics regarding a potential kill, and shall not be the least ashamed of it when it is my knife that is the instrument of your death-dealings, because you seem like a nice person.”

“Thank you! You seem very nice too.”

This complement was followed by a very fine and gentle smile, that I looked at smiling, and smiling in silence, we saw the river appear behind the corner. I hoped that she, in return for the knife, would design a T-shirt, especially for me, bring the plans to a tailor, and get it made out of satin, silk, Kashmir or some expensive fabric she would deem me worthy of wearing.

“This is a great river for fishing. You don’t see m’ so clear very often. I saw salmon in this river and I’d love to fish one out myself for the cook at the Bilderberg. They said the salmon I ordered there yesterday came right out of the stream and I didn’t doubt them. According to the chef, the deer-meat gets delivered by a hunter who hunts with a crossbow.”

“That’s me!” I proudly stated, “I always test my hunting-knives on a deer when it’s the season. I have a freezer full of deer-meat. The wolves don’t really mind sharing. Last year, I shot a deer, but didn’t kill it with one shot. I ran up to it to finish the kill with my knife but out of nowhere, a wolf jumped on it, and another one. I saw that deer get ripped to pieces by the wolves. I let them have it off course, and walked away but the omega, whom I’ve named Charlie, was following me a little, leaving the deer for the rest of the pack. I drew my knife again and tight my coat around my arm in case the little fucker would attack me, and I grinned wildly at him. He also showed his teeth, but I was the first one to growl and when he heard my growl, he went back to the pack. I never told anybody about it until now.”

“That’s incredible!”

“Yup, it was my greatest hunting experience. Ever since the incident I see the wolves sometimes, from afar. Mostly it’s only one but sometimes there’s two or three of them. I call them the pack of thieves, because they stole my prey. Their hunting-grounds are way up north, and they don’t seem to share the grounds with any other pack. I think their territory is somewhere high up in the mountains. Whenever I’m in nature for a couple of days and camp out, I hear their howling come from over there. I also saw a brown-bear once, two weeks hiking up north from here, but it didn’t seem all that interested in me. It was just scratching it’s back against a tree.”

“Show me your growl,” she said, and I growled my most vicious growl. She answered with the growl of a puma, which sounded frightfully authentic and made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

“You know, it’s so refreshing to breath in this nice clean Viking-air. I was living in the big Apple just two months ago. You ever been?”

“I’ve never left Europe.”

“Really! I thought you were American! You don’t have an accent or anything. I was just wondering which part of the states you were from… Are you Norwegian?”

“I’m Dutch.”

“But you don’t seem to have a Dutch accent either.”

“Well, I could talk with a bit of an accent if you like,” I said in my most Dutch English.

“That’s a really cool accent. My grandparents, whom I visited in Brooklyn, came from Ireland. It’s my mother’s side. I’ve been touring Ireland a little and drank a bunch of Guinness but I can’t really say that I reconnected with my roots. I mean, I was born in L.A., and I sound L.A. and dress L.A. and lived L.A. and even made it in L.A. You know, when they say that if you make it in New York, you can make it anywhere, they actually mean that you can make it in L.A. My dad was an editor for Paramount and he really wanted me to become an actress, but fame always kind of detested me. I like anonymity, and it’s really hard to make a career in that biz as an actress and not become famous. I am a good actress though. I played Shakespeare in the university and I fell in love with the role of Ophelia. You know it?”

“Do you like to play Ophelia because you are a fatalist?”

“Something like that. Fatality in the sense of mortality. That play really helped me accept my imminent death. That was a really important step towards learning the art in dealing it. Don’t you think death is beautiful?”

“Yes, very much so, but only if it means something.”

“That’s a very nihilist perspective you’re giving me. I’m not insulting you, I like Nietzsche too, I mean who doesn’t, but I don’t share that perspective at all! I think all life means something, and death brings it to completion. Birth and death always have a story in between. Birth needs death. Death needs birth. Like the light wouldn’t make any sense without the darkness, for how else could we even distinguish? I never really looked at myself as a fatalist but now that I think about it, singing that siren-song of Ophelia… I have this image in my head of myself, as a beautiful young corpse, drifting in a river like this one, among white water-lilies.”

“Could you kill a praying man?”

“No, I was nice remember. And I’m an Irish Catholic. Why do you ask me that?” she asked as she took a golden cross on a chain from behind her dress and was dangling it between her fingers.

“I’m sorry. It’s just that, I wasn’t always nice, and I didn’t aways believe in God. I was an atheist when I first read Hamlet and I put myself in his position there. What was that uncle praying for? Redemption? Salvation? Some sort of forgiveness from God? It must have been a very selfish prayer, and if I would be there, as my old atheist self at least, I would have killed him there on the spot, so he could die the death of a good man, as an evil one, and then it would be up to God to give him that final judgement he must have been so anxious to receive. If there would be a God at all...”

“What a foolish notion! Do you… I’m sorry: did you think any metaphysical jibber-jabber could excuse the act of the kill in that fashion? It is a kill that absolutely nothing could justify. Be it a foul-hearted uncle, who killed your father and fucked your mother, Ivan the Terrible or Himmler in his prime, what it comes down to is that you, who are supposed to be the good guy in this story, stabbed a praying man in the back!”

“You’re absolutely right. I couldn’t have said it better. We should always look at this world as we see it in the first place. Sure, Hegelian ethics, Kantian analytics, Biblical analogies, Marxist explanations etcetera, etcetera… it could all help us make sense of this ever so complicated realm of the senses that are, the human senses and therefore… I don’t know…”

She thought a little…: “Hyper-complicate the input regarding the configuration of information received…”

“That was right on the money!”

“Thanks, glad to help you out. But now, you were saying something about this world as we see it,” she said as she held her hand up, and kept it aimed at a murder of crows that was flying over.

“Yes, as we see it. That, as you so nicely put it, is always what it comes down to. The reality we experience directly, and have direct influence over should always be the main focus in our lives, because if that is out of balance, I don’t see how you could balance anything outside of that. I mean, look at that,” I said referring to a fat girl who was walking in the direction of the train station while looking at her phone, “her life is confined within lighten rectangles.”

“Can you blame her? She bit the apple.”

“I wasn’t blaming anybody.”

“You were pitying.”

“I was exemplifying.”

“I heard pity in your voice. Don’t be ashamed. You wish you could help a lady like that. You want her to see the crows fly over too. I bet you tell yourself otherwise often, but you seem a lot nicer than you consider yourself to be. You are really nice. As a matter of fact, you’re one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, if not the nicest.”

“O stop it!”

“But it’s true! I think you just wanted to kill the praying uncle so Ophelia didn’t have to die in the play!”

I laughed out loud. When I was done laughing, I lit another lucky and blew some smoke to the clear blue sky. I wanted to say something, but all the things I wanted to say were really nice and I hated being nice. I wondered why that was for a moment, and then it came to me:

“That was always the one thing they said about me! Sure, Sven has all these problems in his head…”

“Sven?”

“My old name.”

“Snooky is better.”

“Thank you, but yeah, always! Look at all the danger! He puts everybody and himself in danger! Sure, he writes all these books that we don’t care about and we don’t mind any of that, as long as he doesn’t act so funny, or talk to himself! O how we worry about him! All these illnesses in his brain! Lock him up again, and medicate him because we all feel threatened! In the isolation-cell again! And again! And again! And for fuck sake Kate… They dared… I practiced Kung Fu for fourteen hours a day in those fucking madhouses on that torture-poison and for fuck sake…”

“He is actually a really nice guy…” she said, bowing her head. Then she stopped walking. I stopped too. I looked into her dark green eyes. She put her hand on the side of my head and held it there for about five seconds. “I feel you,” she said. Then we walked on.

The gesture she just made had a powerful impact on me. I felt the warmth of her person through that thin white glove on the side of my head and saw the grace in her eyes. There was no doubt that she too, was considered to be an outcast at some point in her life, for how else could she possess such empathy regarding it? Luckily, psychiatry had trained me very well in hiding my emotions, and holding back my tears, because there were tears to hold back, I saw her eyes stayed dry as well, but I somehow just knew that we would later think of that moment, when we would be alone, and shed those tears that we held back then.

“Let’s get something to eat for the road,” I suggested, pointing at the only supermarket in town, that we were about to pass.

“Let’s.”

We walked inside. “You buy, I carry?” she suggested as we entered the supermarket.

“Dealio. Does madame have any special wishes?”

“A two-pack of sugar-free Red-Bull would really put the pep in my step.”

“Let’s see what they have in their energy-drink selection. It’s such a tiny supermarket.”

“I just love that. Everything is way too big in the states. Out here, it’s just so… pittoresque.”

“Well, they don’t sell the sugar-free Red-Bull by the two-pack, so I shall just buy you two individual cans, and for myself, hmmm…. I think I’ll go for an Assault today,” I said as I put two sugar-free Red-Bulls and an Assault Monster Energy drink in our basket. “Now for meat and skittles.”

“I haven’t had skittles since I was a teenager! I totally forgot about Skittles! I used to love Skittles but then I started eating Snickers Bite and I forgot about them… My love for Skittles has now totally been rekindled and is stronger than ever! I can’t wait until I can eat one again. I still remember that good old Skittles flavor. I think I’ll have a green one first. Green was, as I recall, my favorite Skittle.”

I threw two bags of Skittles in the basket she was holding, went over to the next aisle, threw two packs of Jack Link Beef Jerky in there and was planning to head to the checkout-counter but Kate was checking out the wine selection, eventually taking out of bottle of red wine.

“Have you ever tasted this one?” she asked, holding up a bottle that said Ulvenblød.

“No,” I said, “but I am very happily surprised that you are also fond of red wine. We are going to need a corkscrew though, and I don’t think they sell them here at the supermarket.”

“I have one on my Victorinox,” she said as she put the bottle in the basket. I checked out, paying cash (I love the Viking-cash, the Krone, who’s coins have square holes in them), finding out of course, that like everything in Norway, Ulvenblød wine was expensive as fuck, and since I like expensive shit, and didn’t live in the most expensive place in the world for nothing, I was happy to buy it. I also bought a pack of Lucky’s and asked Kate if she needed more cigarettes.

“White Davidov’s please.”

I also bought an expensive hemp supermarket bag with a Viking on it, because that Kenzo purse Kate was wearing didn’t seem like it could fit even the Skittles. She took the bag off the counter and carried it as promised. When we were outside, she directly took one of the bags of Skittles out of the bag, picked a green one and stuck it in her mouth. “Jammie! Nostalgia! Here, catch!” she said as she threw a purple Skittle high up in the air, that I cached in my mouth. She clapped three times in her hands, picked up the bag and walked on. We were approaching the edge of town.

“I just love Øldenfur,” she said, in between eating Skittles, as we exited the town, where the stone street turned into a dirt track right at a sign that said UTGANG ØLDENFUR.

“What brought you here? It must be something more than just looking for the perfect ax…”

“The train brought me here. I just went here because it was the last stop.”

“The final destination.”

“It was destined to be final.”

“Finally, it was destined.”

“It was destiny.”

“What a pleasure to find you here.”

“The pleasure is mutual my dear dove.”

“Then let the pleasure commence!”

“Little Lucifer’s, here we come! Have you ever read Proust?”

“I have, but not in French. I bet you read it in French…”

“Why?”

“Because you are an American who is familiar with the word Pittoresque.”

“I’m flattered but you wrongly assumed. I read Proust in English under a French weeping willow, during my first trip to Europe while I was seventeen. My father is French and we were there at some old farm that his beloved grandparents lived in. I couldn’t understand a word they were saying but they seemed nice. And while my father was getting drunk all day on this local French wine, and my mother was taking rides around on a scooter, I just read Proust all day. Believe it or not but that book was read in four weeks.”

“You read In Search of Lost Time in four weeks when you were seventeen?”

“Yes.”

“Bravo,” I said. Then I tried to find something in Proust’s lost time, and found many things, but ended up not mentioning any of those things, because it suddenly dawned upon me why she started about Proust. “Maybe, if you have a scone at Lucifer’s, you’ll have a Proustian moment about reading Proust.”

“Eating a scone, thinking about Proust writing about eating a scone, thinking about his mother kissing him goodnight, followed by the thought of my mother, kissing me goodnight when I was a kid, and then, looking at you…” she stopped talking and started blushing.

“You don’t want to spoil it with a stupid flirt. But a stupid flirt won’t spoil it. Come one… pretty please? Say what you were thinking.”

“You KNOW what I was thinking. The problem with you is that it is just a little too easy to talk to you, and that you’re so nice and GOD DAMN IT ALL TO HELL! WHY DON’T I THEN JUST SAY IT STRAIGHT TO YOUR UGLY BEARDED FACE! WHY DON’T I?” she screamed, putting the bag down and looking me straight in the eyes. I grinned at her screaming. “YES, WHY DON´T I JUST SCREAM IT RIGHT IN YOUR STUPID UGLY FACE! I JUST MET YOU…” - she looked at her silver pocket-watch - “FOURTY MINUTES AGO! AND GOD DAMN IT! I´M TOTTALY FUCKED IN THE HEAD, DAMNED TO HELL, GODFORSAKEN, IDIOTICALLY AND MADLY IN LOVE WITH YOU!”

I pressed my lips against hers and held her tightly in my arms. She held my head with both her hands. We stood in that position for about fifteen seconds before she disconnected her lips from mine, still holding my head and she looked at me intensely. “I have a girlfriend to dump,” I said.

“Do you love her?”

“She wouldn’t be my girlfriend if I didn’t love her.”

“What’s her name?”

“Jenny.”

“Is she Norwegian?”

“No, she’s German.”

“Does she know about that,” she asked, releasing my head and pointing at my belt.

“I told her I do a little Kung Fu for relaxation.”

“Shitsnacks. Can I meet her?”

“Of course. But I think I should talk to her first. She’s… She’s a beautiful person Kate. She…”

“O, why not!” she said as she picked up the bag and started walking with it. “Tell me all about your beautiful girlfriend! I actually want to hear about her, but you have to promise you’ll dump her TONIGHT or I’ll go Kung Fu on you, and after I take your eye, she’s going to get an ax to the head. You kissed me remember, so I think that’ll be justified murder and eye-taking.”

“I think so too Kate, but look at our plans for today. Scones and coffee at Lucifer’s, Kung Fu at the abandoned church, that I’ve never seen by the way…”

“It’s well hidden. A deer led me there,” she said with a lot of anger in her voice, and a bit of resentment even, but the tone was not at all bitchy or sarcastic. A deer actually led her there.

“…and then dinner at the Bilderberg, which will lead to wine and more wine, and then…”

“Yeah… OK, let’s totally fuck each other’s brains out tonight and then you can dump your girlfriend tomorrow,” she said with a voice that was way happier all the sudden.

“Well, actually… I was thinking that I’ll just go home around midnight, not having had sex with you, and dump my girlfriend without having cheated on her. I… I really feel bad for her Kate. You have to understand. Her heart will shatter into a million pieces. She wants to start a family here, and learn Norwegian and…”

“But you were having second thoughts?”

“Yes. I refused to come in her pussy.”

“So, she wanted to get pregnant but you refused to come in her pussy! I’m sorry for laughing, but I can imagine the fights in between you two! ‘I hate you Snooky! You don’t come in my pussy! Fuck me Snooky! And come in my pussy this time or I’m going to smash the dishes again!’”

“It’s not like that. It’s awful. I… OK, you deserve to hear all of this, so I’m going to tell you, but first, let’s have a little break here and smoke a cigarette because I need a little time to process all of these emotions and look at the water for a while. I’ll tell you about Jenny and what it was and what it is and then you’ll understand the gravity of what I am going to do tomorrow, after I come home drunk as a skunk at two in the morning and sleep on the couch,” I said as we approached a bench at the side of the river. We sat down on the bench. Kate lit a Davidov and I lit a Lucky. We put our arms around each other’s shoulders. We looked at each other again. I couldn’t resist playing with her hair a little. It resulted in a ferocious kiss, in which our tongues met this time. Both our cigarettes were dropped burning on the dirt. Our hands were caressing each other’s bodies. If she’d wanted me to, I would have made love to her right there on the spot, so hot was her mouth, the lust in her eyes, her movements, her being.

“I love you” was quickly spoken by both her lips and mine in a short intermission of the kissing, while our foreheads touched. My sweat against hers. The taste of her lips on mine. And I can’t say who said I love you first. It was almost simultaneous. I gently pushed her back on the bench and laid on top of her. Then we rolled off the bench and almost into the river. We kept making out there in the grass for a long time. Then we looked at the water, sharing a Davidov and glances of tender love.

“You know what my stupid girlfriend did a few days ago?”

“She’s gonna get so dumped and she doesn’t even know it,” Kate whispered excitingly in my ear.

“She rubbed the sperm she sucked out of my dick on her pussy,” I said, laughing.

“NO WAY!”

“I SWEAR! She fucking did! I was so angry with her about it. God damn, that girl needed to be dumped right there on the spot!”

“The dirty little slut tried to impregnate herself!”

“She kind of did! But she swore she wouldn’t do it again. That she would be a good girl from then on out and would always swallow, patiently awaiting the time when I would feel that I’m ready for kids.”

Kate was laughing very hard. “Alright Snooky… I understand now. This girl… God damn Snooky. She deserves a perfect dump. She must be dumped in the most splendid fashion. When she sees that the competition is mois, the stunningly handsome Kate Fragmantine, also known as the Jumping Puma, she will understand that she is just the sweetest sperm-dumpster in the world and not much more than that. Ah… now your angry! Yeah… You don’t like that do you Snooky, but it’s true! Your girlfriend is a total sperm-dumpster and… O shit, I’m sorry. She must be a little more to you than just a sweet sperm-dumpster. Don’t start hating me now! It’s just so god damn funny to me! But yeah, you have some serious dumping to do. This should not be done hastily, as I suggested earlier. We’ll take our time with her, and make sure she won’t kill herself after losing you, or do something stupid, like getting addicted to heroin and prostituting herself in Amsterdam or finding religion in India and getting raped by six Hindus in the temple of Vishnu… you know.”

“Thank you Kate, for being so understanding. And will you please, although you are definitely partially right about her, refrain from calling Jenny a sperm-dumpster?”

She spat in between her fingers. “I promise,” she said, “I see now that this is not just ‘some girl’ to you. I had to dump somebody too in L.A., because she…”

“She?”

“Yes, she. Mandy. I thought she was the love of my life, and she was for a while. I met her after some guy dumped me in a real bad way so I was the perfect prey for that lonely lesbian at the L.A. university. We were together for two years almost… we…” Kate looked at me as she chocked up. Tears were rolling down her face. She was immensely beautiful at that moment. “She killed herself in New York three months ago,” I could hear by her voice that it costed her much effort to push those words out and there was a bit of silence before she continued; “Can you imagine how bad I feel now?!”

Tears were now also rolling over my cheeks and into my beard. “For fuck sake Kate,” I said, “Let’s get coffee.”

“Yes, for fuck sake. Little Lucifer’s isn’t open twenty-four-seven,” she said, wiping the tears out of her eyes and getting up. I wiped the tears out of mine with the sleeve of my Tweet and took her hand. We walked up to the bench, where she picked up the bag. She took out a sugar-free Red-bull and the Assault Monster before she lifted it. I took the Assault monster from her hand and drinking our energy-drinks, we continued our way.

“That stupid girl! I said I needed to go on a spiritual journey in a year, that I didn’t know when I’d come back and she might be better of finding another, since I just found my style. She begged me to take her with me. I thought maybe, I could have her as my apprentice, because I just received my purple. I was training Flying Tiger very hard, because even though Mandy and I had a lovely apartment at Venice beach, I was not satisfied with my life. She was trying to be a graphical artist, but she sat at the beach too much, or on the couch, smoking weed all the time that I paid for with my Kenzo job, that was very challenging at the time. I worked on those blue prints like crazy, always at the office, and then there were beats to produce, samples to record, editing frequencies, playing my violin, finding musicians to play piano, guitar and bass riffs I could loop... Sometimes a good day of surfing in between. And Mandy, buying all that weed with my money, buying all sorts of bullshit crystals that were supposed to inspire her graphical art… Working on this ‘Graphical novel’ that was about our lives but that I could never look into before it was done. Eventually I gave her an ultimatum after an argument we had. She was accusing me of not spending enough time with her, that I was neglecting her, that I was a workaholic. So, I talked to Kenzo and they gave me two months off, since I had made an incredible amount of overtime and they didn’t want to risk losing me to a burn-out. I came home and told her that I took two months off work so I could help her with her graphical novel. It was actually her plan to just eat each-other’s pussy, hang out at the beach, watch Netflix and smoke a shit-load of weed. I got very angry at her and told her that if she wouldn’t show me her work NOW, I would dump her right that minute. And very hesitantly, she handed her notebook to me, in which, I kid you not, was a bunch of hentai in which I, as a badly drawn caricature of myself, was the star. I walked around L.A. in a superhero-suit with a golden strap-on and was fucking everybody imaginable. There was not much of a story, and I hated the idea of myself as some sort of superhero with a golden dick. I threw her notebook in the garbage-disposer. She was so upset with me destroying this “masterpiece” that she attacked me with a kitchen knife. I broke her arm in two places and took her eye, that I also threw in the garbage-disposer. I put a bandage around her eye and called my drug dealer, asking him to bring the strongest syringe of heroin he could get his hands on. He came swiftly and pushed the drugs into my girlfriends’ vein, whom I had to gag and tie up, to stop her from screaming and making spastic movements. When the heroin had kicked in, and the night was upon us, my drug-dealer and I put her in my Porsche Boxer, and driving fast to Skid Row, I told her that if she refuted anything I’d say to the nurses that her arms and legs were next for the garbage-disposal.

After I drove around Skid Row a little, making sure that the car with Mandy and I in it was seen properly by the camera’s. I stopped by a trashcan that was not camera-supervised and dumped both mine and Mandy’s wallet in there. Then I drove to the closest hospital, and I told the nurses at the first aid that we were robbed by five Mexican men who were wearing purple and that they, after taking our wallets had broken my girlfriend’s arm and had cut her eye out while they made me watch. I also said that I didn’t want to press charges because the men who mugged us told us that they now knew who we were and that they would kill our families if they’d get arrested. My girlfriend, who was all doped up on heroin, told them a very strange story about getting fucked by Mexicans with golden dicks and was laughing very hard about that. I left her there in the hospital, got my shit, sold my apartment and car on the cheap to my drug-dealer, packed my essentials and went to New York. I rented a cheap apartment in Brooklyn, near my grandparents and met some cool Irish Americans like myself. But I had to leave at some point for the other side of the ocean. I was like Ulysses on the shore.

So after about a month of living there, I wrote Kenzo a proposition to work at home, with one of my greatest blue-prints for a T-shirt line under the paperclip of the e-mail and they send me a renewed contract right away, and even gave me a raise. But then Mandy, whose arm was still in measure, and had a glass eye, thanks to me, paying the hospital bill, had traced me down, and had hitched all the way to New York to find me. Because the rain was pouring that day, and I felt such pity for the poor thing, I let her into the apartment after I heard her voice on the intercom. She begged me to take her back. She felt so much remorse about drawing that stupid book, and she felt so useless, so alone, and she couldn’t live with herself after she attempted to murder me. She promised to make it all up to me. That she would change. That she would get a job, any job, and she would quit the weed…”

“And what did you say to her?”

“I told her to go kill herself, and that I’ll forgive her when she’d be dead.”

“Did you mean it?”

“Yes.”

“And how long did it take her to do it?”

“She jumped off the Brooklyn bridge that same night.”

“Do you regret it?”

“Yes, very much. It was this evil in me. This evil… sometimes Snooky, I get this evil thing, this demon, and I can say things like that, and mean it. I drove that poor girl to suicide in New York three months ago, broke her arm and took her eye, but I never killed anybody. That, I swear. Did you ever kill anybody?”

“I killed three people in cold blood. It was a hit-list. All were psychiatrists who took my freedom and poisoned me with drugs. I killed them for revenge. Nobody could possibly know it was me, because I planned out every kill very carefully. I deserved my revenge, got my revenge and am glad I did what I did and got away with it. Killing them gave me closure and the world is better off with them dead. The Dove was sleeping. They shouldn’t have woken the Dove.”

“Tell me. I suppose you haven’t told anybody about it yet, just like I haven’t told anybody about Mandy’s eye.”

“The first one was a woman. She diagnosed me as autistiform, schizo-affective and maniacal of the bipolar type. She forced me to sign the diagnoses, saying that if I wouldn’t sign, she wouldn’t release me out of the clinic I had been locked up in for five months. I refused to sign at first, but my parent almost begged me, so I signed, putting ‘under protest’ beneath my signature. That happened when I was twenty-one. Six years later, I was released out of a long-term clinic, that they send me to because ‘nothing seemed to help’. I had practiced a lot of Kung Fu there. When I was out, I had a lot of money, because I got a disability check every week, since I lost my job in production. I bought a car and a hunting knife. I was very careful about my research. I always dressed in a hoodie, following that lady around. She still worked at the same clinic in the Dutch town of Zwolle, where they injected me with so much Haloperidol that my eyeballs started rolling and my hands started shaking. Tardive Dyskinesia, now that’s hell. It’s an illness you only get from psychotropical drugs. They try to attack the symptoms with anti-Parkinson medication but damn… It’s hell. So, the bitch had to die, but it was hard because she was never alone. She just rode her expensive Volvo from the clinic to her house, where she had a family. I checked her daughter’s Facebook on a broken I-phone I bought from a junky. I had even taped the camera on it. Apparently, they went skiing in Winterbergen, in west Germany during Christmas. So, I went to Winterbergen that December, and I went skiing. It seemed that the bitch, miss Hoogenvloed, didn’t like skiing though. She just sat at the café and stayed in the hotel while her family was on the slopes. One day however, she was taking pictures. She stood on the side of a slope, behind one of those orange fences. And after her daughters and her husband went by, and she had taken their picture, I stabbed her in the back of the neck, dragged her further from the slope and buried her in the snow. And guess what? The Winterbergen ski-resort was not too keen on receiving bad publicity so they somehow dressed it up as an off-slope accident. Even though she was obviously stabbed in the neck, they told the press that she slipped, because apparently, her leg was broken. Could you imagine those Winterbergen people breaking the leg of her corpse, just so people wouldn’t get the wrong idea about their ski-resort? She was cremated four days later in her home-town of Zwolle. There wasn’t even anything about it in the press. I was skiing for about one more week in Winterbergen after the kill and saw the rest of the family eat at the hotel when she was found. They didn’t even seem to be all that upset about it. All they talked about was money, and that now, without that woman’s salary, they might not be able to go skiing each year.”

“And, what did you feel when you killed her?”

“Euphoric satisfaction.”

“And the best thing about this story is, I think, the fact that you stayed in the skiing-resort afterwards, and didn’t run. Weren’t you scared of getting caught?”

“Just a healthy dose of paranoia. But then I heard about the ‘accident’ in the hotel two days later, because it took them two days to find her, and it came with a warning that you shouldn’t even go off slope if you just want to photograph nature, and if you did, the ski-resort of Winterbergen wouldn’t be responsible for any accidents. And so, since I already booked for the entire month, I just skied a little more the following week. I killed that woman in what should have been her last day at Winterbergen.”

“Wonderful. Tell me about the next.”

“O that was easy shit. Mister Jim van der Wort, a ‘crisis-doctor’, who labeled me as a crisis and got me locked up in another clinic. He had his own practice, and went there by bicycle. I stood on corners, watched him for about a week or five, and learned his route. There was one part of the route that he was alone on sometimes. I timed it to the exact. Unless there was some ‘crisis’ going on, where he had to be the judge of, he went over that road, going home, in between five-ten and five-twenty every Wednesday to Friday. So, on a rainy Thursday, the bicycle-track was all empty except for him and me. I caught up to him, riding a bicycle I just stole and drew my knife. It was another quick stab in the back of the neck. I heard him fall and didn’t even look. I rode away as far as I could and threw that knife and the bike in the river at some deserted place. It was all over the news for a while. I was even caught on camera, with a green hooded raincoat, a bandana over my mouth, sunglasses and cloves. Needless to say, they never found out who I was. Apparently, mister van der wort had an opium addiction. That suddenly came to the light. I didn’t know about it but the media assumed that it had something to do with that. They even ended up arresting a heroin dealer that was affiliated with him but they couldn’t convict him for the murder. He did get three years for possession of firearms and opiates though. In the end, nobody gave a fuck.”

“Did he also have a family?”

“Yes. A daughter of seven, a son of eleven and quite a beautiful wife.”

“Did you feel bad for them?”

“Not really.”

“And did you feel the same Euphoric satisfaction when you killed this van der Wort?”

“Yes.”

“And how long was that, after Winterbergen?”

“Three months.”

“OK, so the last one, who was that?”

“The last one was a guy named Dirk Fielemans. Three months after I killed Vanderword, I started stalking him. He was the one who send me to the long-term clinic. He also had a family but after stalking him for a month or so, I found out that he went to a whore once every while. I contacted this whore and met up with her. I gave her the hundred-and-fifty euros for the date and told her that I would give her another five-hundred if she’d tell me about Dirk. It loosened her tongue. Apparently, mister Fielemans had a piss-fetish and paid her to piss on him and fuck him with a strap-on. For one-thousand euros more, she’d let me hide in her closet to shoot some pictures of the act. I paid her and shot some pictures of him drinking her piss and getting fucked in the ass. I send mister Fielemans copies of the pictures at his home address, telling him that if he’d pay me twenty-thousand in cash, I’d delete them, otherwise I’d publish them on the internet. I told him to meet me at a deserted parking place next Sunday at three a-clock in the morning. He showed up with the money and I killed him right then and there, with my bare hands. I shattered his Addams apple with the back of my right and watched him choke in his own blood. I castrated the corpse and stuck his testicles in his eye-sockets after I had cut his eyes out. It was an artwork to behold. Then I put the pictures in his jacked and rode off on another stolen bicycle. ‘Masochistic psychiatrist murdered’ was the front page of the newspaper two days later.

The murders were not linked and I never even got suspected of killing any of them. Now, nobody cares about it anymore.”

“And of course, your girlfriend doesn’t know about this…”

“You’re the first person I told, as you suspected.”

“Wow, that makes me feel really special!”

“You are really special,” I said as I kissed her cheek quickly during the walk. So much was shared that we both needed some silence to reflect. She presented her hand and I took it. We shared some Skittles and Beef Jerky, arriving at Little Lucifer’s without having said much more to each other.

Little Lucifer’s was ran by Lazarus; an old blind blues-musician from Mississippi. He and his daughter Maybelline, who was his only waitress, were the only black people in the region. Lazarus was sitting outside in the sunshine, playing his steel string guitar while his daughter was tending to the guests on the terrace, who were mostly Norwegian tourists on a break from their hike. The small terrace was about half-full. Kate and I took place on one of the tables and waited for Maybelline to take our order. Maybelline was talking Norwegian to two girls sitting next to us. She went back inside of the house, which bottom floor served as the coffee-place and bakery and she came back with a trey filled with coffee and scones. She talked some more Norwegian to the girls before she turned her attention to us.

“Hey Kate, hey Snooky. What a lovely weather it is today! Dad has been sitting in the sunshine ever since the sun broke through. You should have heard him sing! He didn’t even grab any coffee when he woke up. He just took his guitar, went outside and sang lightning Hopkins. HEY DAD, ARE YOU GONNA SING WOKE UP THIS MORNING AGAIN?”

“ALREADY WOKE UP THIS MORNING SWEETHEART!”

“O well, he might start singing again soon. What will you have?”

“I’ll have three maple-scones and a big pot of black coffee please,” Kate said

“And for me, three lemon scones and also a big black pot of coffee.”

“Okidoki artichokes,” Maybelline said, since that was her catchphrase that everybody loved.

“What a beautiful girl she is,” Kate said, looking at her ass as she walked back into the coffee-house. Maybelline was wearing jeans that were cut off above the knees and one of those Norwegian sweaters, with that Norwegian sowing pattern on it.

“I just love that you’re bisexual. That way, we can sit on terraces and talk women together. What do you think of those Norwegian chicks next to us?”

“O those Norwegian girls! They sure know how to make a girl in this country! There so… I mean look at them! Pitch blond natural hear, fair skin, white as snow and that uhm… what do you call it… they have this sort of… I mean, they’re not fat or anything. They have this…”

“Plumpness.”

“Yes, that Viking plumpness.”

“Watch it, they might speak English…”

“We actually DO speak English!” one of the girls said with a heavy Norwegian accent. “And I don’t know… I don’t know why you think this but we are NOT plumbers!”

“We didn’t call you plumbers, we called you plump,” Kate said, “It’s a complement.”

“What does it mean?” the other girl asked.

Kate looked at me, “You said it…”

“It means you have a soft body.”

The girls seemed a lot less insulted after that explanation. They looked at each other and giggled. “Do you mind if we join your table?” Kate asked.

“That’s OK,” the girl that first talked to us said. We moved to their table.

“I’m Kate and this my friend Snooky,” she said after we sat down, presenting her hand for a shake. They shook Kate’s hand and mine and told us their names were Vigdis and Tonje. “We’re from Oslo,” Vigdis explained, “we’re here to enjoy the beautiful nature. It’s almost summer and we both took vacation early. Not many tourists here now.”

“In the summer it is soooo crowded!” Tonje said, lifting her hands to the sky.

“Yes, last time it was soooo crowded!” Vigdis confirmed.

Maybelline put the coffee and the Scones on the table. “Hey Snooky, can I ask you something?”

“Sure Maybelline, what is it?”

“I’ve talked to dad about the situation in the summer and he agreed to hire another waitress because it’s just too much work to do it alone during the season but he didn’t really like to hire Norwegian girls because he says they’re too expensive. And last time you were here with your girlfriend I sat at your table because there were no quests anyways and I asked her what she did for a living and…”

“She told you she worked around the house.”

“Yes, and she seems really nice, and she speaks quite a bunch of Norwegian already so I thought maybe she’d like to help me out here and do some waitressing.”

“That would be perfect for her Maybelline! She’s been complaining about being bored once every while ever since we’ve started living here! I’ll suggest it right away when I see her tonight.”

“Thanks, Snooky,” she said and she went to another table, asking if the people sitting there needed a refill.

“O, I thought you were boyfriend and girlfriend!” Tonje said.

I started blushing as Kate said that this was not yet the case, because even though we already fell in love that afternoon, I still had to dump the girlfriend I already had. She said this without any shame, knowing she was torturing me, and she seemingly enjoyed seeing me blush.

“Is this true?” Vigdis asked me.

“Yes. We fell madly in love after we met at the trains-station this morning. We kissed on the way over here but I have mixed feelings right now because my girlfriend has really done nothing to deserve being dumped and I still love her. It’s just that… It’s different between Kate and me.”

“What’s so different about her?” Tonje asked.

“I do Kung Fu,” Kate said.

“So, you fall in love with her because she does Kung Fu and your girlfriend doesn’t?” Vigdis asked me with amazement.

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“No, it’s not Snooky. It’s simple. You fell in love with me and I fell in love with you because of Kung Fu. It’s that simple.”

“I don’t understand…” Tonje said and after a quick break in which she tried to find her words she went on with a razed voice, “why is this so important? Love is just… love. Love is not about… HAYA kicks and punches… love is… why is it so important to you that she does Kung Fu?”

I took a sip of my coffee and lit a cigarette. I looked Tonje in the eyes. “We’re not normal people. We are Kung Fu people. Now Kung Fu is not a sport. Kung Fu is an art. It means King Enemy. Now this artform is very, very old and Kate and I have been practicing it all our live. We are masters in this art. And as a master, you can recognize another master by their movements, even if they aren’t practicing. Kung Fu is about animals, and spirits. It is about philosophy and inner peace. We have practiced many styles of masters that came before, like the Crane or the Tiger, and from those styles and animals that we’ve watched, we’ve created our own. It is not just so that you choose a certain animal, the animal also chooses you. My animal is the dove. It wakes. My style is thus, Waking Dove. Hers is Jumping Puma. What all of this comes down to is that Kung Fu makes you incredibly cool, and if you somehow became a master - and this doesn’t happen to many people - you are the coolest of the cool. So, even though I love my girlfriend for all that she is, and she is a lovely girl, I have to dump her, because somehow, the universe has destined me to find another master this morning, in the form of the stunning lady sitting next to me here, and because she is way cooler than my girlfriend could ever be, I won’t spit in the eye of destiny by ignoring my love for her and the love she has for me out of pity for my girlfriend.”

“Then why do still call her your girlfriend?!” Tonje asked angrily.

“Because I have not broken up with her yet.”

“And when are you going to do this? Next year?” Tonje said. She sounded very upset.

“Look, Snooky and I are both going to work this out. Tonight, we are going to make a plan together for the perfect way to dump his girlfriend.”

“The perfect Dump!” Vigdis excitedly said. “You know, I’m actually a writer. I write blogs! And I want to be famous in America! I could like, write another blog in English about it because my English is really good… We’re here for three more weeks. We’re camping at Flindø. You know it?”

“I know it,” I said.

“What is it?” Kate asked.

“A camping.”

“You mean a camp-site.”

“It’s a European thing. It’s just a grass field with a restaurant, showers, toilets and a playground on it. You bring your tent and you can camp out there for, I don’t know.”

“Actually, not that much,” Tonje said, “Only six Krone a day because it’s not the season yet.”

“Maybe I should just buy a tent and camp out there too. Staying in a Norwegian Bilderberg, I’m actually almost losing more money than I make!”

“You can borrow my camping-gear sweetie! I got a tent big enough for two people. We can camp out at Flindø together so my girlfriend has some time to get all her stuff together at my house.”

“Let’s get it arranged tomorrow. I’ll sleep one more night at the Bilderberg and then we go to Flindø! It sounds really nice, this… camping-thing.”

“So you’re Americans?” Vigdis asked.

“She’s American, I’m Dutch and the girlfriend I have to dump is German.”

“Oh,” Tonje said as shegfeA±SUSGHdo´SGoSBDCHN