The Discoverer (74 page)

He had had a sudden, catalytic thought and for one long, intense moment he had the whole of that later so renowned television series clear in his head, in astonishing detail. It all came to him in a flash, unfolding as beautifully as a pack of cards fanning out under a conjuror’s hand. In his mind he pictured himself meeting Ana again as he was packing to leave for home. She would ask: ‘What are you taking with you?’ And he would reply: ‘A bunch of stories.’

It was as simple as that. None of the countless intellectual and, in some cases, extremely sophisticated analyses of
Thinking Big
can mask the
fundamental
flash of insight which gave rise to the series, this milestone in
television
history: in Montevideo, thanks largely to a young woman named Ana, Jonas Wergeland discovered that he wanted to be a storyteller, someone who gathered his people around a gigantic campfire in the shape of millions of switched-on television sets. ‘Look,’ he wanted to say. ‘Listen. Once upon a time there was …’ He would seek out stories, find a couple of dozen Norwegian men and women whose tales were worth telling. And that is what he did. When the series was finally in the can, Jonas Wergeland had not only
presented
Margrete – in secret – with a gift, he had also erected a public edifice full of frescoes, created an ABC for the nation. He felt genuinely proud and pleased the day he discovered that stills from some of his programmes had been used as illustrations in a school reading book.

Jonas gave himself a push, heaved himself out of the deckchair. The canvas billowed like a sail in the soft breeze. He folded the chair without any bother and carried it back to the hotel. Each step told him that he was a well man. He could tell right away: his lungs felt healed.

The worry about his lungs would resurface one last time, though. In prison. And this time it was really serious. During his first year inside he was constantly aware of an inexplicable pressure inside him, an alarming
sensation which tended to intensify just before one of Kamala Varma’s visits. One evening in late winter a tightness localised in his chest area prompted him to strip to the waist and stand in front of the mirror in his cell. For a second he had the distinct impression – although it may have been a trick of the light – that his chest had become transparent, stood revealed as a web of tissue. He caught a glimpse of colourful, glistening, criss-crossing threads: it looked as if he was wearing a filigree waistcoat. The next day he had himself examined by the prison doctor. He could find nothing. ‘Maybe we should get your lungs checked, just to be on the safe side,’ he said and gave Jonas a
referral
slip. A week later, accompanied by two prison officers, Jonas Wergeland made the journey along slush-covered roads to an X-ray clinic in town.

He realised, as he sat in the waiting room, that he was not at all
apprehensive
. Instead he felt expectant. Like someone who had spent years at sea and was hoping at long last to sight land. The lady at the reception desk had given him a folder. He sneaked a peek at the form inside, read the words ‘Thorax front and side.’ Had to be something to do with the chest cavity, he guessed.

An assistant in a white coat showed him to a changing cubicle, then to the X-ray room where he was asked to stand with his chest and shoulders pressed against the image plate. He almost felt a little solemn. He thought of the Voyager probes, which were even now zooming out across the cosmos. Among all the information designed to tell extra-terrestrial beings something about the human race was a picture showing an X-ray of a hand – as if to say: we are so clever that we can see through our own bodies. Out of the corner of his eye, Jonas followed the movements behind the screen, in the control room. The radiologist gave him instructions over a loudspeaker, told him how to stand, told him how to breathe. Jonas had no difficulty in holding his breath. He had always been good at holding his breath. Yet again his thoughts returned to life-saving. Or rather, the thought occurred to him that they were going to take photographs of his spirit. And maybe in a way that is what they were doing. What they were actually saying was: ‘Hold your spirit!’

Afterwards, as he stood with the X-ray pictures and the letter for the prison doctor in his hand, he was suddenly filled with curiosity. Ungovernable curiosity. The officers who had brought him here seemed to be in no hurry. One of them was reading a newspaper. The other, who was standing by the door, shot Jonas an inquiring glance. Jonas motioned to them to wait a moment. He hefted the large, brown envelope in his hands, as if he thought the weight of it could tell him something about his future. He took out one of the pictures and held it up to the light, remembering Olav Knutzen,
remembering
the Red Room, that basement in Grorud. He was staring at his own lungs, a dark and yet transparent image. Did this photograph merit an OK
stamp? His ribs looked like a sort of cage. It was almost as if prison life had forged bars inside him too. He recognised all he saw. Apart from one thing – something in his lungs, inside the cage, a very small, pale patch, shaped rather like a butterfly. He felt a chill in the pit of his stomach, soon his whole body was caught in an icy grip.

He was in prison, convicted of murder. One little misdemeanour couldn’t hurt. He tore open the letter to the doctor and read the radiologist’s notes. The conclusion was given at the bottom in block letters: HILUM-MILD FULLNESS. FURTHER EVALUATION RECOMMENDED.

He went back to the woman behind the glass in reception, said he wished to speak to whoever had written the note about his X-ray. ‘I have to talk to him,’ Jonas said. ‘Right away.’ The lady at the window was not at all sure. It was against all the rules, Jonas knew. Don’t you realise who I am, he almost shouted at her, but bit it back. She would have taken this as a reference, not to his erstwhile television celebrity, but to his notoriety as a murderer.
Somewhat
startled, she picked up the phone, asked him to take a seat, wait.

The doctor came out. The radiologist. It was a woman. She said it was okay, she could make an exception. She did not say why. She took him into the viewing room. The prison officers waited outside. The walls were lined with light-boxes. On one hung some X-rays. There was a Dictaphone on the table. Jonas caught the scent of a discreet, distinctive, but good perfume. He had the feeling that he could trust, could talk to, a doctor who wore such a perfume. The badge on her coat said that her name was Dr Higgs. Her blonde hair was nonchalantly pinned up. When she hung his X-rays on a light-box he noticed her bracelet, an unusual, broad band of gold, decorated with hieroglyphics of some sort. ‘I have to be honest,’ she said, looking at a picture of his chest viewed from the front, at the vague suggestion of a shadow with a scalloped outline that reminded Jonas of a butterfly. ‘I don’t know what that is.’

‘Don’t doctors always know what things are?’ he asked.

He could not understand why she suddenly glanced at him in surprise, while at the same time permitting herself a little smile. Was she thinking of his television programmes or – he had to turn this over in his mind a couple of times before daring to pursue it all the way to its conclusion – was she thinking of Margrete, of the fact that he had been married to a doctor? Had she known Margrete?

‘Don’t tell me you believe that,’ she said. And yet, when she raised her hand and pointed to the paler patch in his lung, the sight of that broad bracelet decorated with obscure symbols made him feel that she must possess a rare brand of knowledge, the wisdom of another civilisation.

Interpreting an X-ray was not always easy, she went on. No matter how experienced you were, sometimes you were faced with something you could not explain. Jonas could not help thinking of the College of Architecture entrance exam, the box with the gauze panels, the little, imaginary
building
barely discernible at the very back. She had never seen anything like it, she said. With her nail she traced an outline in his lungs. It could be a cyst, a tumour, or something to do with the lymph nodes. She didn’t think so, though. To Jonas her bracelet, the gold, seemed to hover in thin air. Whatever the case, it was impossible for her to say right here and now whether it was normal or abnormal.

The room seemed supernaturally white due to all the light-boxes. Jonas studied the photographs of his own chest cavity. There was something about the exquisite, almost topographical, structure of the lung tissue that put him in mind of a map. Of an unknown continent. Maybe it was still possible to discover new countries. Inside oneself. He peered intently at the light-box, at these images which, though flat, had a depth to them. A warm, tremulous thrill ran through him. Chill dread was replaced by impatient suspense. Was there any chance of examining it more closely right away? Dr Higgs said yes, that was possible. Jonas liked her even more for that. She’s just as curious as I am, he thought.

He went through the same procedure as before, the only difference being that this time the X-rays were taken in the CT lab, after they had injected a contrast dye into his arm. He had a strong impression of being in the hands of Fate as the CT bed was slowly passed through the hole in the gantry and he positively felt the rays slicing through him. Or no: he was a galaxy. Someone was looking at him through a telescope, searching for an unknown planet.

Dr Higgs took him back to the viewing room. In the light-box, next to the first pictures, there now hung forty different sections of his lungs. It was odd to stand there in those bright surroundings and see his innards exposed in this way, spread out like a transparent fresco on the walls. He knew you would have to be very well-versed in anatomy, in the architecture of the human body, to know what you were looking at. The only thing he could make out in each slice was his spine. He could not help thinking of cuts of meat. It’s like seeing yourself carved up, he thought.

He looked back at the first X-rays. Again his eye was drawn to the white, butterfly-shaped patch, just above the heart. Now, though, the sight of those wings or whatever they were, seemed to reassure him. He realised that the tightness in his chest could just as easily be a sign of something good – a feeling of well-being so unfamiliar and so confusing that it had actually caused a panic in his breast.

‘I had thought it might be
sarcoidosis
,’ Dr Higgs said, her gold bracelet flashing across the pictures as she explained what they showed, something about lymph nodes, something about connective tissue. ‘But not according to the CT pictures.’ She showed him the same section of the lungs in a number of the CT pictures. In these the patch was darker, but still transparent. ‘It almost looks like a little cavity within the cavity of the lung,’ she said.

He considered this thought: a chamber within a chamber. A tiny lung inside his lung. He relaxed even more. Maybe, he thought excitedly, the body also had a
guarde-roba
, like the ones in the Renaissance palaces that Aunt Laura had told him about: a secret room full of mysterious objects. Dr Higgs was right: there were many things which medical science had not yet discovered – like the gland that caused your head to reel when your girlfriend came walking towards you. Descartes might well have been on the right track when he located the interaction between body and soul, the source of the spark which rendered man more than a machine, in the so-called pineal gland.

‘I don’t know what it is,’ Dr Higgs said again. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. It might not be anything serious. No two lungs are exactly alike.’ She handed him an envelope. ‘Give this report to your doctor. It’s up to you to decide, in consultation with him, whether you want to have more tests done.’

Jonas thanked her. Thanked her most sincerely. Even shook her hand. Again his eye was caught by her bracelet. He was about to ask about it, but she beat him to it. ‘Yes, you’re right,’ she said. ‘I bought it from your aunt. The finest goldsmith in the country.’

Rings in water, spreading outward, touching other rings, far, far out.

He had already made up his mind. He would not be pursuing the matter. The radiologist might not know what it was, but Jonas did. A new organ. Or the rudiments of a new organ. Inside his body, inside the chest cavity, a third lung was starting to develop. The way he saw it, it might even have been this new, little lung that had saved him when he had come close to dying, committing suicide, in the early days of his imprisonment. Later he was also inclined to give this organ the credit for the fact that he had been open to a new and overwhelming acquaintance: Kamala Varma.

He viewed his life in another light. He had become aware at an early age of his rare gift – the ability to think several thoughts in parallel. Which made it all the more frustrating not to be able to put these skills into practice. Because the extraordinary, the truly amazing things of which he felt himself capable were of a quite different order to the highly acclaimed television series which he had eventually managed to produce. As far as he was concerned all his projects had been failures. Like producing scrap iron when he possessed the formula for making gold. Now, though, he saw that there had been a purpose
to these fiascos. All his mental powers, the talent he feared he had abused, had been converted into something physical, corporeal. His incessant cerebral exertions, all his grandiose, unrealised plans had prepared the ground for the growth of this new organ.

During his years in prison, his cell would become many things to Jonas. But if it is true that every person has their Samarkand, a place in which they find the essence of life, a place where one can see what lies
beyond
everything else – then yes, that prison cell was Jonas Wergeland’s Samarkand.

Jonas was allowed to take one of the X-ray pictures – the one showing his chest cavity from the front – for his cell. He hung it at the window and would lie gazing at it morning and evening. In a way he had always known it: that inside every person there was an Organ X, or at any rate the potential to form such an organ. We could never stand far enough back from ourselves in time. Even though we knew that mankind was constantly evolving. Time was when we had had gills. There in his cell, Jonas saw his youthful conviction confirmed: there is more life in us than we think. We are unfinished.