…of dissatisfaction

After the door slammed shut it was like this new silence erased all trace of them. I had to restrain myself from giving a loud cheer. I pulled off my tie, which slid off from around my neck like a snake… undid the top button of my shirt… walked over to the big window… and submerged my gaze in the sea of glittering lights. I thought about the missing girl again, and it wasn’t so much grief or fear on the family’s behalf… who at that moment were sitting in a room someplace or another in the city staring at the telephone… that I felt… but a kind of resignation, fatigue, and powerlessness at the thought of how exceedingly little it takes before everything you’ve built your existence upon is snatched away from you, or destroyed. I saw Hans-Jacob and Elise drift out of the darkness and across the courtyard, looking like they didn’t have any legs. For some reason or another I was convinced that they were talking disparagingly about me.
I stared at the grey discs cast by the lights in front of the garages. If something were to happen down there, I thought… if someone tried to force one of the garage doors… or a person was attacked and robbed, if someone tried to rape a young girl… what an infinite distance there’d be between any possible compulsion I might feel to intervene and save someone and the actual practical possibility of me carrying out some kind of deed. I thought about the door that was locked after Elise and Hans-Jacob, the lift that in all probability was at the ground floor and would take forever to get up here to the seventh floor, all this would lie between the screaming woman and myself. I pictured Elise as this woman, Hans-Jacob lying in a pool of blood on the ground beside her, and I tried to imagine my most likely reaction without reaching any conclusion with which I felt could be satisfied. No, I simply had no idea what I would do. And suddenly I wished the whole evening undone. That they had never come, that it had been an ordinary Saturday… spent in front of the television… and if I had to be completely honest, I’d prefer it be quite a while before Elise and Hans-Jacob came to visit again.

[Self-Control, Sæterbakken, S.]