Borderliners (38 page)

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F
or twenty years I refrained from looking up Ka
tarina. When at last I did so, at the child's request,
she had disappeared, leaving no address.

But I have not given up. I know she is out there
somewhere. She
will
read this, and understand it more deeply than any other living person. She will
read it, and it will be clear to her that never since
what happened back then have I
stopped trying to touch time and
see it change.

Then she will look me up. She will meet the woman and
the child
and like
them. If she does not have
a family of her own
we will
tell
her that she
can stay as long as she likes, no one here expels anyone.
Ragnarok is past.

Then I will show
her the laboratory.

Ragnarok.
We learned about it, they said it was the end.
The end
of the world, total
obliteration.

As an adult I read it for myself,
and saw that they had been
wrong. There was, after all, an afterlife.

It is there in the
prophecy of the Voluspa, in the Elder Edda.

There it says that the gods lay on the grass in the sun and played
a game, the pieces were of gold,
it was brilliant. Then
came
the war
between the light and the dark, disaster,
total obliteration.

But afterward the gods were lying there in the light
again, like
before, playing with the gold
pieces.

As though death and war and defeat
had not been the final act
after all but merely a new beginning. As though, for the gods, time
was one long process of
repetition.

As though, after
Ragnarok, there was yet another chance.

To
have yet another chance.

The child is my chance, the third. When she looks at
me—directly
and at
length and without judging, then it is as though she is the
adult and I am a child, and that
she is making sure that nothing
bad shall befall me. Or as though I am grown up and she is
me as
a child—but a
child who, this time, is protected by its parents, as you yourself never were,
or no, it is impossible to explain, but she is my third chance.

The first was when Karen and Erik Høeg found me, at
Sandbjerggård
, and adopted me in 1973, when I
was fifteen years old. For
this I will be eternally grateful to them. Without this I would have
been obliterated.

The second chance
is the woman.

The laboratory,
here, is the fourth chance.

When you are given yet another chance, time goes
backward, the
past
returns. Then, yet again, you go through whatever it was that
led to disaster. But this time
there is hope.

"Furthest back you remember a plain," she said. "It is
from the
days before time enters your
life, in other words you have lived
without
time, the way small children do."

This she said on the telephone,
when we had been separated
totally.

Furthest back I remember the Christian
Foundation. The garden,

the
bathroom, the reading of the Thought for the Day from
the
Christian
Daily.
These
memories are not in any sequence, they lie
on the timeless plain of my childhood. From there I sank
down
ward, maybe I
was born to
sink,
maybe this was the covert
Darwinism.

There was some slight upward movement, like my succeeding
in
getting to Crusty
House and then to Biehl's. But, in the main, I
sank.

This lasted until Katarina and August and I
were
brought together in
time
and space. Since then I have never completely lost heart.

To begin with, after the confrontation, I was sent back to Lars
Olsen Memorial. They were
concerned. If I had been strong enough
I would have reassured them. I was just
hibernating,
I had retreated,
downward and inward, to a quiet place. At Crusty
House, Oscar
Humlum
put his frogs—the ones he would make his money from,
by eating them—at the very bottom
of the vegetable drawer where
the kitchen maids would not find them.
Under the leeks,
where the
temperature was just above freezing
point.
There they did not die, they fell into a deep, motionless winter sleep,
they
waited for the
light. If you took them out and let them lie on your
hand, they
stretched
out toward the warmth and came to life.

We met—Katarina, August, and I—and from then on, it became
impossible ever again to give up
completely. I have given some
thought to why this should be.

I believe it was love. When once
you have encountered it, you
will never sink again. Then you will always yearn for the light and
the surface.

Twice I have seen
Biehl in the street, Copenhagen is not that big.

He has grown gray, like stone. He still walks briskly and
pur
posefully,
although his sight does not seem to be so good.

The
thought crosses your mind that he has aged like a caricature
of UexkiilPs theory: a lonely man, behind an
unreliable sensory
apparatus, in an
unreal world.

When this is finished I will give it to him. I will find
him, stand
in front
of him, and give it to him.

"Back then I
said not a word. Now I have said it."

There exists a time lapse so lengthy that science finds it impossible
to conceive of anything greater.
This—2 x 10
¹⁷
seconds—is the time
taken by a ray of light to traverse the
conjectured radius of the universe. It is known as the
cosmic chronon.

There exists a space of time so brief that it is
impossible to cal
culate
with anything less. This—10
^-23
seconds—constitutes the
greatest lower bound for the attribution of
significance to regular
processes. It is
known as the
atomic chronon.

It is thought that there also
exist an upper and a lower
mental
chronon,
limits for how brief and how lengthy a space of time
consciousness can span.

If
you are fit, then this is of no great interest, then you have no
problem sharing time with other people.

But if you become unwell, and if time starts to float,
then you run into the mental chronon.

When Biehl had struck—hard, deliberately, and at the
same time
senselessly—there was a very
brief pause. It was too brief to be
noticed,
it lasted less than one mental chronon, it was there, and
then it was past, and only traces were left. A
vague fear you did
not understand.

But if you were ill, then you sensed this moment.
That was precisely what we had, a pathologically heightened sensitivity to very
brief spaces of time. Then you saw all of the endless and complex
intimations of power contained in that instant; saw,
too, how all of
those present were left
with a subtle, everlasting stamp of fear, and
how this had to do with learning about time.

SEVEN

U
exküll said that man is not much better than
a spider.

A spider's sight and hearing are poor and its sense of
smell is not that
great
either, which means that its surroundings are limited by its sensory apparatus.
But it has its web, by means of which it has extended
its sensibility far beyond
itself. Its sense of touch is very acute, by every
movement of the web it can judge
how far off and how big.

In the mornings at the Christian
Foundation, when you crept out
into the garden before anyone else was awake—not even the
sisters—spiderwebs hung between
the bushes. Drops of dew clung
to the strands, they caught the sun. And if you touched the web,
even quite gently, the spider
would not appear. You had wanted to
trick
it into showing itself, but its sensitivity was so much greater
than your own, it knew you were too big and
powerful.
Even
though you
were quite small.

Man is not much
better than a spider, says Uexküll.

The biggest webs
were maybe thirty inches in diameter. Plus the
strands to the tree trunks to which they clung. We
had an agreement

that
no one was allowed to break the web, it was a rule
among the
children,
the web was so big and the spider so small, you knew how
it must have slogged to make it.

Sister Ragna, who looked after the garden, swept it down
with a
broom. When
she did this, things always went very still, so dead still
that she always stopped short and
looked around. She could not un
derstand it, all these children suddenly standing absolutely
motionless.

During these moments she was in
imminent peril of her life. Only a few details, the difference between her body
weight and ours, the
fact
that the office on the second floor directly overlooked the gar
den, prevented us from
obliterating her.

The webs were so perfect.
So regular
and yet irregular.
Totally identical and always
different.
Infinitely.

And
almost never bigger than thirty inches.

Through its web the spider did not sense the whole world. It sensed
only that part of it that the web could pick up.
Direction, distance, maybe the approximate weight of its quarry,
maybe its size.
But
certainly
not much more.

Thus, too, with science and its
twin, industrial technology.
Phys
ics extends its web out into the universe or down into matter, and
thinks it is discovering ever greater slices of
reality.

It
might be feared that this is a
fallacy, that
is what
Uexküll was on the verge of believing. If the spider extended its web farther,
beyond the thirty inches, it would still only be
able to sense what
lay in its own and
the web's nature to sense. It would not find a
new reality. It would discover more of what it already knew. Of
what lay beyond—colors, birds, smells, moles,
people, sisters, God,
the
trigonometric functions, measurement of time, time itself—it
would still be hovering in absolute ignorance.

That is the one
thing I wanted to say.

The other is this: Maybe it is possible to put it in stronger terms
than Uexküll. Maybe the spiders
at the Christian Foundation were

smarter
than man.
Because they never extended their webs beyond
a certain limit.

What would have happened if they had done so? If the
spider's
web was
extended to infinity, as far out across and down under the
threshold of the human sensory apparatus as technology
has ex
tended its sensors?

What would have happened is this: Pretty soon the spider would
be unable to cope physically with
checking out everything that be
came caught in the web. And if the web kept on extending, farther
and farther away, then the spider
would start to receive signals from
areas inhabited by other insects and with a climate other
than its own. And it would receive many more signals than it could deal
with. Then the abnormally large
web and what it brought back
would come
into conflict with the essence of the spider, with its
nature.

While the web would begin to
change the world around it.
Maybe
it would
become too
heavy,
maybe finally it would crash to the
ground, dragging great trees with it in its fall.
Maybe it would take
the spider with it
into perdition.

This is the other thing I have wanted to say: Man's
exploration
of the world,
its web, also changes this world. When I lie awake at
night, when I cannot sleep and I
sit up and look at the child and
the woman, then I am afraid, then I know that the web has
extended
far too far beyond the sensory
apparatus. Now it is reaching out to black holes and stellar nebulas, and down
to elementary particles
that grow ever
smaller, it is discovering things that then rebound
onto everyday life, becoming refrigerators,
schoolbooks, cesium
clocks,
submarines, computers, car engines, atom bombs, and a
steady increase in
the pace of life.

In 1873, at the meridian conference, when Sandford
Fleming of
the Canadian Pacific Railway
suggested a "universal world time"
for the entire globe, America had seventy-one different time systems.
In
1893, the American version of Fleming's initiative was raised to