Present Tense Machine

by Gunnhild Øyehaug

Genres: Women's Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

From the author of Wait, Blink and Knots, Gunnhild Øyehaug's Present Tense Machine is a playful and transcendent novel about language, family, and parallel universes.

On an ordinary day in Bergen, Norway, in the late 1980s, Anna is reading in the garden while her two-year-old daughter, Laura, plays on her tricycle. Then, in one startling moment, Anna misreads a word, an alternate universe opens up, and Laura disappears. Twenty years or so later, life has gone on as if nothing happened, but in each of the women’s lives, something is not quite right.

Both Anna and Laura continue to exist, but they are invisible to each other and forgotten in each other’s worlds. Both are writers and amateur pianists. They are married; Anna had two more children after Laura disappeared, and Laura is expecting a child of her own. They worry about their families, their jobs, the climate—and whether this reality is all there is.

In the exquisite, wistful, slyly profound Present Tense Machine, Gunnhild Øyehaug—called “one of the most exciting writers working today” by the bestselling author Jenny Offill—delivers another dazzling renovation of what fiction can do: a testament to the fact that language shapes the world.

Release date: January 11, 2022

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Print pages: 176

Sample

CHAPTER 1

The Emergency Stairs


There are student flats above and below them, and another across the landing. The students quite often party together, from Thursday to Sunday. For example, Laura might be sitting reading a book early on a Thursday evening when she’ll hear the clinking of bottles out in the cold concrete stairwell, hushed voices, and steady footsteps on their way up, and then she’ll know that in about four hours’ time she will hear loud, shrieking voices bouncing off the walls as the party makes its way back down, and later, if she’s unlucky, she’ll hear the even louder noises of a nachspiel at three in the morning. And if she’s extra unlucky, the noise will be from the flat above, where they are dancing and jumping around to “Let’s Dance” on the wooden floor that is Laura’s ceiling, under which Laura is lying on her side with her knees pulled up, eyes open, with her duvet between her thighs under her big belly, and an orange earplug bursting out of the ear that is turned to the ceiling.

* * *

It’s not possible to live here with a baby, Laura and Karl Peter have decided, after just such a night. It makes them sad, because they like their flat on the third floor of the old brick building in Møhlenpris, the Manhattan of Bergen, as Karl Peter likes to call it, even though he’s never been to New York. They like the feeling of being alive that they get from living there, they like the idea of a melting pot, all layers of society living on top of each other, the football pitch that’s missing one corner because there wasn’t room, the Ping-Pong table on the pavement in Konsul Børs’ Gate, the light that’s caught between the buildings on the straight streets as the sun goes down. But the drug addicts are a problem; Laura and Karl Peter don’t like the dealer who lives on the other side of the street, on the ground floor, and they don’t like the needles outside the main door, nor are they particularly fond of the structure of the so-called chimney houses, of which there are so many in Møhlenpris, one of which they live in themselves: they’re brick on the outside and wood on the inside, which means that the houses act like chimney pipes in the event of a fire and draw the flames up through the floors with great speed and efficiency, and for precisely that reason they’re not happy that they have a smoke detector that goes off all the time and that the landlord has done nothing to fix it. All in all, it’s time to move.

* * *

Laura and Karl Peter are twenty-four and twenty-eight, respectively, and 164 and 198 centimeters tall. One is dark, the other is fair. At the time of writing, Laura is standing in the roughly one-square-meter hallway between the kitchen, the bathroom, and the bedroom. When I say “at the time of writing,” I’m of course referring to myself, not Laura. She’s not writing, I am. It might perhaps have been more correct to write “at the time of writing, I have wet feet,” because it’s true, I have wet feet, there’s a big hole in my boots. And I can’t get new ones. But anyway. Back to Laura. She opens her mouth and prepares for what in linguistic terms is sometimes called externalization, in other words, language as speech. Karl Peter, come here, she shouts. She can hear that he’s sitting at the piano in the living room, tinkling away, which is why she shouts so loudly. Laura has just picked off all the masking tape that was stuck around the doorframe to the emergency stairs, it’s the first time that Laura’s seen the emergency stairs, and what she sees shocks her. How could they have lived here, in this fire hazard of a house, for three years, without knowing? The thought rips through Laura, causing her heart to beat faster than she feels is good for the baby.

* * *

Recently, Laura has had the disconcerting feeling that everything is double. She suspects it has something to do with the fact that she’s pregnant and that it’s firing up some sensory center or other in her brain that she doesn’t know the name of, but that she remembers only too well—that’s to say, she doesn’t remember the sensory center itself, but its effect—from some overwhelming anxiety attacks in her intense young woman stage from ages nineteen to twenty-one, when she would suddenly get the feeling that things were not what they seemed, that the wallpaper was coming toward her, or that the ringing wasn’t in her ears, but in the air outside her head, etc. Yesterday on the street she saw a man walking a dog, which she later found out was a Neapolitan mastiff, the kind of mastiff that has a face that is so wrinkled and pendulous that it looks like someone has made a mistake, because what on earth is the purpose of all that excess facial skin, what evolutionary advantage could that dog face have over other dog faces, where the skin lies tight over facial bones, why did the cheeks need to fall like curtain folds, as though the whole face were a crushed, molten drop, an enormous horror-movie mask, she could just picture the dog trying to eat, its entire face mushed against the dog food, then it turned and glared at her with its aggressive dog eyes deep in all that sagging flesh, and she felt as though the mastiff were quivering, as if he had doubled right there in front of her.

* * *

But right now Laura stands there holding in her hand all the masking tape that’s been taped around the door to the emergency stairs. Her face is an ordinary human face. The masking tape is ordinary masking tape, stuck neatly and smoothly over the gap between the door and the doorframe, just as it had been when they moved in, and Karl Peter wanted to leave it as it was. To stop any drafts from getting in. They live in a flat full of drafts. There’s also a draft from the large gap under the balcony door, at the opposite end of the flat. A cold draft circulates through the flat at floor level, like a chilling, repetitive thought, a depressing sigh, a sign, Laura has sometimes thought, a warning from the flat of what it’s really like to live in a building owned by a man who does whatever he can to avoid ensuring his tenants’ safety, who can’t fix the fire alarm even when he’s getting complaints every week, who tricks and fiddles with the electricity supply, who doesn’t replace the windows when they’re cracked, who does nothing about gaps and drafts. If they take off the tape, they’ll have to buy more. Then he, Karl Peter, will have to do the taping. And that would be so boring. Laura, on the other hand, likes to be prepared. She likes to visualize things, in the way that downhill skiers visualize the course before they push off. In the event of a fire, she wants to know the terrain. When Karl Peter has been out on tour with his band, Laura has gone to sleep with a flashlight and a knife under the bed, with this in mind: In case of a fire, or break-in, the emergency stairs are the way out, that’s how she’ll escape. She first has to turn the key in the door out to the emergency stairs, then she’ll have to just push it with all her might, because she won’t have time to pull off all the tape. Last year, she went to bed like this one hundred and fifty-six times; this year, so far, it’s been only seventy-seven. False security often feels remarkably like real security, and it has worked for Laura, she has managed to sleep, even though the knowledge that she lives in a firetrap has bothered her almost every day since they moved in, and even though she knows that the hand holding the knife (if she manages to grab it from under the bed where it’s lying, should an intruder suddenly appear in the bedroom) will wither into trembling, prickling fear, and be incapable of stabbing, and even though she knows that she will probably die of smoke inhalation before she’s managed to get to the emergency stairs—and that if she doesn’t die, she might panic and not be able to turn the key in the lock, if she’s even able to find the key, which is so easy to see in broad daylight, when you’re not enveloped in thick smoke.

* * *

The tinkling doesn’t stop. Hello, Karl Peter! Laura shouts again as she stands there with the door to the emergency stairs wide open. Karl Peter saunters through the kitchen, reaches out to grab a jar of jam, apple jam made by Bård, Laura’s father. Bård loves making jam, and this one has a hint of vanilla. Karl Peter picks up a spoon, takes a large mouthful, and comes out into the small hallway where Laura is standing with the masking tape in her hands. Take a look at that, Laura says, and nods at the stairs. Jeez, Karl Peter says, have you taken off the tape? I thought it would be impossible. It’s become part of the place, Karl Peter says, astounded, you can’t just remove its identity. Karl Peter is just so Karl Peter as he stands there, eating apple jam. He’s got bare feet. He smells of cigarettes. He’s tall, he has a way of being tall that makes him seem like a cardboard cutout, or a statue moving around the room, somewhat reluctantly, as if being a tall statue is heavy work. When he’s up onstage with his guitar, it’s as though the beams from the spotlights are illuminating a Norse god in a T-shirt and jeans. He always looks fierce onstage, and offstage, gentle. Or laid-back. Karl Peter takes hold of the doorframe and leans past her to look down the stairs. Jeez, they’re wooden, Karl Peter says. That’s a bit of a paradox, isn’t it? The main stairs are concrete, and the emergency stairs are wooden? Mm, says Laura. We have been living in a chimney for three years without knowing that the emergency stairs are made of wood, Laura says. What does that tell you about us? Well, Karl Peter says, as he eats another spoonful of apple jam, that we’re trusting? That we’re optimistic? That we don’t worry without reason? These are all criticisms of Laura. Laura is pessimistic. Laura often sees the downside first. Laura worries before she needs to. Laura is often a deep and dark amalgam of unnecessary anguish. Have we tested the smoke detectors recently? Laura asks. No, I’m pretty sure we haven’t, Karl Peter says. Didn’t we change them last year? Don’t worry about it. But we will have to buy more masking tape now! He throws up his hands. Fuck, crisis! He laughs, pulls her to him with the arm that’s not holding the apple jam. He kisses her. Don’t stress, he says. It probably just means that we’re living in parallel universes. You don’t say! Laura says. The stairs are parallels, Karl Peter says. One is concrete, one is wooden, see? Karl Peter says, and kisses her neck. Laura, in addition to feeling that everything is double, has been feeling aroused more often recently. It has almost become a problem, not for Karl Peter, but for Laura, it’s too much, it makes her unfocused. That’s because the vagina is swollen during pregnancy, the midwife said when Laura, blushing, asked, and the increased blood flow creates that feeling. But that’s not such a bad thing, perhaps, the midwife said, with a mischievous smile, as she looked through Laura’s notes. Karl Peter, for his part, has gotten hung up on parallel universes; not only does he like science fiction, but he often argues, after they’ve watched one of the many films from that particular time in history that are based on the idea of parallel universes, such as Interstellar, or Arrival, or Doctor Strange, where, for example, extraterrestrial universes have intelligent life-forms that can communicate, or parallel dimensions that you can enter by making circular movements with your hands, or, as in Interstellar, time can dilate so that a father, who is an astronaut and has got caught in a wormhole in space-time, can travel back to the time before he went into space, and in a spectacular manner convince his daughter, then a child, to become a space scientist so she can solve the mystery he will send her from the future, but the father naturally cannot communicate, not even with the then-version of himself, as his daughter has already solved the mystery as an old woman, and humanity has moved to an extraterrestrial colony (because life on earth could no longer be sustained), and she has released him from the wormhole in space-time and he manages to meet her just before she dies—Karl Peter has often argued that the idea of double lives is of course entertaining, but that the profusion of films about parallel universes in our time, a concept that serious scientific circles would not touch with a barge pole only a few years ago, but is now being studied like never before, well, what does that tell you about our time, Laura, is it a sign of the end of the world? he might say, in the serious voice of a news broadcaster. When Karl Peter asks these questions, he doesn’t usually expect an answer, he just asks them, so when Laura replies that she thinks it means that we’re living in a time of transition, that we’re living in a paradigm shift, and perhaps not for the better, but hopefully, in the long term, like in Völuspá, the first poem in the Poetic Edda, which was probably written in the tenth century in the transition between paganism and Christianity and prophesized the end of the world, a new world will be born from the old, Karl Peter is reminded of who she is, that she’s twenty-four and finished her master’s degree in half the normal time, that she’s already teaching, that his partner is a genius; time of transition, he says, that’s beautiful. But back to the kiss on the neck by the emergency stairs. Not now, Laura says. It’s not exactly sexy to discover that the emergency stairs are wooden and might go up in flames before the rest of the house. She crosses her arms over her belly. Karl Peter laughs and kisses her on the forehead before going back to his piano; Karl Peter—if one were to google him, one would discover that “Karl Peter Voll wife” is the second post on the search list, because people want to know if he’s married, when they stand there at his concerts and dream about romantic scenarios where his dark eyes soften at the sight of the face of precisely the person who’s dreaming.

* * *

But, to summarize, with regard to Laura, holding masking tape in hand: Is she an anxious, worried person, a bit of a control freak? A person with neatly folded shirts in her wardrobe? If one saw Laura’s messy wardrobe, where the clothes are more falling down than hanging up, or her cluttered bookshelves, or if one were to consider the string of bad relationships (with idiots, whom she’d fallen in love with because of their particular way of being, which then proved to be a cover for their real way of being, namely, the idiocy) she’d had before she met Karl Peter, which all demonstrated her remarkable ability to fall in love with great gusto, or if one were to look at her inner life, which basically resembles a maelstrom, or a swarm of bees, or a volcano, or a very, very deep and dark lake that conceals a terrifying sea serpent, or a torrent, or open skies, or a fierce, crackling bonfire, or a powerful, eternal pull, a slow-exposure explosion, then one would know that the answer is not simply yes. Laura has never quite known how to deal with these forces that somehow feel luminous, as though she were some kind of chosen one who’d been put on earth to do good, only she hadn’t discovered what yet, or how. And every so often they could pull in the opposite direction of good, these forces. Her usual horrific example: the time when she was a child and persuaded an entire birthday party, one which she had been dreading, to follow her away from the birthday child and back to her house to look at some very special marbles, and she didn’t realize that anything was wrong until the mother of the birthday child came and reminded her in a sharp tone that today was not about Laura. Laura has since become wary. Is there a birthday child here that she can’t see? And because of these untamable forces, she sometimes wonders if she has developed a personality that is the opposite—timid, frightened, nervous, in other words, that likes to be in control, and sleeps with a knife.

* * *

Whatever the case, we can safely say there’s little about Laura to indicate that she’s living in a parallel universe created by a misreading. But, in fact: she is. If Karl Peter knew this, that he and Laura, and everything else he could see around him, were in a reality parallel to another reality, that everything was double, that behind—or rather, beside—this Møhlenpris there was another Møhlenpris, beside this Bergen there was another Bergen, beside himself there was another himself, he would probably have been very surprised. He might well have been very happy. Astounded. Felt a strong, existential rush, a very specific kind of wonder, the kind of wonder you feel when you realize: nothing is as you believed it was, everything is different. But we’ll come back to that. Right now, Laura stands here eating the apple jam with an angry expression on her face, she picks up the jar that Karl Peter has put down; Karl Peter usually eats about half a jar on one slice of bread, and that’s not going to happen this time, Laura thinks.


CHAPTER 2

The Relay


It’s wet outside, and the snow that fell yesterday, which Leikny, or was it Dagfrid, or was it Margit, or was it Valborg, or was it Gine, or was it Constanse, or was it in fact Anna, yes, it was, it was Anna, together with Jostein, Peder, and Elina, who sledded in the snow that fell yesterday, up in the big field, because Jostein thought it was time that they did something together without their mobile phones, that same snow is now lying soft and heavy on the moss. All the trees are exposed, with black, naked branches. The spruce is never as dark green as when there’s snow on the ground and it’s raining, Anna thinks, on her way up to the office, which is the smallest room in the house, with space for only a desk and a chair by the window, and some overfull bookshelves. She steps over the piles of paper to get to the desk. Anna is forty-four years old, and as she sits down on the office chair, she looks up at the A4 sheet of paper that she printed out yesterday and stuck up on the side of the bookshelves, which she uses as a bulletin board: ERIK SATIE, this spring’s strangest concert? On Sunday, June 16, according to the poster that made such an impression on Anna that she bothered to print it, Erik Satie’s piano piece Vexations will be performed in the Henrik Kaarstad Building at Volda University College. People can apply to take part, which was what caught Anna’s attention. Because Anna knows only too well what Vexations is. When she was younger and played the piano, this was one of the pieces she practiced for a similar performance, an absurd happening at the meetinghouse in Ørsta. Vexations is no more than a couple of lines of music at the top of a page, but they’re supposed to be played 840 times. It takes around twenty-five hours to play all 840 repetitions in a relay, depending on how fast they’re played. The piano and sheet music were the baton, and the theme was to be performed by the students and teachers at the school of music and drama in Ørsta and Volda. But Anna pulled out at the last minute. She’d always pulled out. She had been supposed to take part in so many concerts, only to pull out at the last minute, that she eventually decided that she had to do it, and her teacher, Alf, had been such a support, they had practiced and practiced, and she mastered it, and the narrative they constructed for her was this: It’s a relay, everyone is taking part, you’re just a link in the chain, you’re not alone, you won’t make or break it, when you sit at the piano, you’re not you, but the music, you’re everyone, the music will continue even if you hit a wrong note or two, if you stumble through the piece, if you play it so badly that it’s comical, if you have a blackout and don’t know where you are (Alf actually said that), the music will continue, and the music will continue after you, because another pianist will take over. And when you’re finished, your minutes will join the great ocean of minutes, and no one will think any more about your minutes than anyone else’s. But then on the day, when her minutes were about to join the great ocean of all the minutes that flowed past, they seemed insurmountable to her, huge, monstrous cogs that would stop the entire machinery, she would, with her body and all her mistakes, ruin everything and be the pianist who remained in everyone’s memory as the one who destroyed the flow, the one who actually ruined the music, the one who, in short, was especially visible as she sat at the piano. Anna, sixteen. She went all the same, to listen, she sat there for an hour and listened to the various students and teachers playing the two lines over and over again, and sitting there, she regretted that she’d not swallowed her nerves and taken part, because she saw that what Alf had said was true. There were several who made mistakes and it didn’t matter. Now she regrets that she was only sixteen and unable to appreciate the absurdity of the fact that Erik Satie was being performed in a meetinghouse, as it often served as a venue for concerts that were not big enough to fill the community center, because there was a grand piano there and good acoustics, and room for the audience, as long as it was deemed compatible with the meetinghouse profile, and Satie was, because the music had no words, and no one, Anna said when she showed Jostein the small poster that she’d printed out from the internet yesterday (and which she’s looking at again now), as they stood side by side at the kitchen countertop cutting up vegetables for a soup, no one in the meetinghouse council knew what had happened when Peter Evans performed the piece alone in Sydney sometime in the seventies, that after he’d played for sixteen hours and was about to start on repetition 595, he suddenly stopped and left the room. Did he think it was enough? Jostein asked, and tipped three diced carrots into the pot. Five hundred and ninety-six was the final straw, if you like? Anna laughed. It says on the internet that he felt that each repetition was slowly eating away at his sanity, and he was being overtaken by painful thoughts, and animals and things started to peer out at him from the sheet music. Hehe, said Jostein. Pass the potatoes. He started to peel them, Elina came into the kitchen, picked a piece of carrot out from the pot and popped it in her mouth, and at the same time snatched the plastic that had been wrapped around the rutabaga from Anna’s hands and held it up in front of her face as evidence. Mom! Elina scolded. Elina is thirteen and obsessed with plastic recycling, all kinds of recycling, she sometimes lies awake crying at night because there will soon be more plastic in the ocean than fish, it’s our responsibility, Mom, Elina says, and Anna usually strokes her hair and says it’s true, and she will try to be better at it, which she quite clearly isn’t yet, she thought that the plastic wrapper around the rutabaga was so small that it wouldn’t matter if she threw in the trash. OKAY, Elina, you’re right, Anna said, and washed it, then left it on the draining board to dry. Hmm, Elina said, and took another piece of carrot before disappearing back to her room to do her homework. Jostein and Anna looked at each other. She’s good, Jostein said. Yes, Anna said. And I think you should do it. But I washed it, Anna said. Not that, the relay, Jostein said. I think you should sign yourself up. You only need to play for five minutes. It’s perfect, it’s the great homecoming, only no one will know. It’s a plot taken out of the best American teenage film. You will be the homecoming Satie queen in this spring’s strangest concert. Anna and Jostein laughed. But the most important thing is that you feel you have something left undone. And now you can do it. Imagine how magical life will be afterward, Jostein said, you’ll feel the release rush through you, and you will be free, completely free. There will be mattresses for people to rest on, Anna said, and even a separate room so you can sleep if you’re doing more than one lap. Hehe, Jostein said. He could just picture it. The pianists lying on mattresses all over the floor, none of them able to sleep because of the confounded music that just keeps playing and playing.

* * *

You don’t need to play perfectly, it says on the poster that Anna is now looking at from her desk, but you do need to know that you’re comfortable playing in front of people. Do you? Could you not be just a little bit uncomfortable? And how big is the scale of discomfort? And would she manage to learn the music? She’d played it for Jostein on Spotify that evening and explained with great enthusiasm that the most interesting thing about the piece, other than the fact that it was so short and was supposed to be played over and over again, was that the composition itself was impossible to memorize, perhaps because it always did the opposite of what you might expect of a tone and the following tone. Haha, Jostein said. You sound like you’re describing an author. Oh, said Anna, who is an author, and who’s writing a novel about language at the moment. But I’m talking about Satie, and am going to finish my little spiel about Satie whether you like it or not, Anna said. You see, in the piece of music there is always a tone that slips out of line, it’s like hearing what it sounds like to get something wrong, what it’s like to stumble all the time, what it’s like constantly to be trying to get something on track, only the track keeps moving, it is, Anna wrote later in her notebook because she realized it would be impossible to say it to anyone, and perhaps it is precisely this that is the obvious and known secret behind writing itself, that writing allows you to say things it’s impossible to say to anyone, or what do you think, Kipp, lying here at my feet chewing my socks that you got hold of just now when I was out of the room, but without further ado, this is what Anna wrote about Vexations by Erik Satie: It is to sit quietly in contemplation and listen to an enormous, yet at the same time very small irritation, beautiful because it is incomprehensible, and therefore all the more irritating. The piece is both repetitive and thus fleeting. And she wrote this in capital letters: AS IF IT ENCAPSULATES THE EFFECT OF ALL EXISTENCE, OF ALL TIME—as though capital letters would help not only with the expression, but also with the understanding of the content.

But for Anna, there’s something about Vexations that fills her with relief. Anna, in addition to the life she lives with Jostein and Elina and Peder, lives in what for her feels like a parallel, secret life where everything is silent, where nothing has happened since that day when something terrible happened, something that meant that she always has this inexplicable feeling of loss, an unfathomable grief, an emptiness beside her that she can never quite grasp, in terms of where this emptiness comes from, because she hasn’t actually lost anyone, except Bård, who left her after two years of marriage in their early twenties, and yet it’s as if something she loves deeply is no longer there, as if she left a newborn baby on a windowsill somewhere and never went back, as if she sleepwalked away from it and ended up in a mystifying labyrinth that took her back to the windowsill, but the baby had vanished—this, obviously, is Laura, the two-and-a-half-year-old daughter she doesn’t know she has, who disappeared on her tricycle outside on the street in Fridalen where they lived, in a rather bizarre manner. Anna lives an ordinary life, where, for example, she goes sledding with Jostein and their two children, but she also has a third child, whom she no longer remembers, she only has the vague feeling that something essential is gone, utterly gone and unreachable. So Anna has a very particular reason to be drawn to the two lines of music, which are almost identical, only she doesn’t know what a good reason it is, she doesn’t know that the parallel life is in fact a parallel universe and the should-could life is going on every single second, at the same time that she herself is aging.

* * *

In the middle of Brian Eno’s soundtrack for the documentary film Apollo, which we have forgotten to say she’s listening to, she hears the doorbell. As the cosmic sounds of the film about the American space project that was the first space project in the world to successfully land a man on the moon continues to play, Anna goes downstairs again, out into the hall, opens the door: There’s no one outside. Just a January day, slush, cold fog. Anna is uneasy. There are no children at home now, they’re all at school. Who would ring the doorbell in the middle of the day and not make themselves known? That’s a good title for a book, Anna thinks. Georges Perec once wrote a novel without the letter e, the most used letter in the French language. When on its own, the letter is pronounced in the same way as eux, which means “they” and refers—possibly—to all those (the author’s parents included) who went missing during the Second World War. The novel is called A Void. Later, Perec dreamt that he discovered a copy of the novel where the letter e kept appearing. And that is how Anna feels, as she stands there and looks at the space outside her front door, where someone just rang the doorbell, but no one is there, just air. She feels like e has just appeared. Because there is something about the empty space that stands there and makes it