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Epilog
Somewhere on a location no one cared about, on a door attached to an apartment which no one
ever visited, sat a doorbell no one ever used.
It rang.
Twice.
But no one opened.
Two light pair of feet turned their heels around and made their way down the flight of marble
stairs and out the building doorway.
Inside the apartment, a ray of light pushed its tiny head all the way through a crack in the closed
curtains of the kitchen window, revealing a million particles of dust dancing indifferently in the
stale Wednesday afternoon air. Once the sound of the doorbell died out the apartment stood in
complete silence. Except for the gentle humming of a pinkish refrigerator.
-

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Chapter II

H
e was a peculiar man, Mr Brisby
Not peculiar in a sense where one wears an orange belt with a blue hat.
But in the sense that was hard to put your finger on.
Some would say he was just one of them carefree people slouching about a little too
unstressed for everyone’s own good. Others said it was all in the details, and that slouching had
nothing to do with it.
Nothing.
The air was loud with anticipation as the sound of a hundred conservative hands clapped away
like machine-guns firing over an open field marking the end of something great.

- Great speech, someone said.

- Yeah it was, wasn’t it, another one proclaimed.
- Yeah, he really nailed it this time.
- Especially the part about family values in modern society.
- Oh, yes and why individualism is losing the war against structural politics.
- And what about where our money…
- Have you ever noticed how men’s hair-cuts always lean to the right, someone interrupted.
- ….
- What? the first one said.
- Well, maybe not always, Mr Brisby continued, but at least 8/10 times I would say.
- 7/10 at minimum.
- I wonder why that is, Mr Brisby mumbled a little to himself but still loud enough to be heard.
- And what other set of traits a left-cuter would have…

He wondered what it all meant, and why nobody other than him seemed to see the importance
of it. Maybe if people would have analyzed Hitler by the direction of his hair, rather than the

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rhetorics of his words, all of it could have been avoided. Mr Brisby looked at the two men and
the two men looked at him. He looked at them with wide anticipating blue eyes and eyebrows
raised so high that they were mere seconds away from popping right off his scalp. But when he
met their eyes he got nothing. He got the sense that they didn’t so much look at him as much as
they looked through him. Not like one looks through a garden window, but like he was just another
one of those blue bobbing balloons the blue tied man with a suit was selling over at the blue
stand at the right. And with every movement of their subtle calculation expressions their faces
looked like someone trying to simultaneously paint a horse and trying to put one’s finger on
something that was a little bit too hard. Mr Brisby looked at the two gentlemen a short while
but gave up and let his brows fall down to their normal disappointing position. He sighed, folded
his eyelids to half their anticipation capacity and wondered on the way home if the world had
always been like this? Or was it just those blue ties that never shut up about their quest for more
money?
It wasn’t, he thought and went to bed.
Finally.
He lay awake for a while pondering about tomorrow while Harry and Hermione tried to sneak
past Mrs. Norris under the cloak of invisibility.
25 in total… 19 and 6 halves, he thought.
He wondered if Ron really enjoyed his fifteen minutes of fame, or if he would rather be under
the cloak?

The next day was a Tuesday.

He knew this because he could recognize a Tuesday coming on a mile’s distance. Mr Brisby hated
Tuesdays, and God knows he earned that hate. But he wasn't going to let that old thought ruin
his day. Not this one. Today was a special day, after all. Today was the day he'd finally become a
man. He and his wife had this inside joke where he called her ”his lady” and she called him
”her boy” and it didn’t matter how great of a mustache he tried to grow or how many tires he
changed on the car, he could never outrun the hard fact that he was in fact a couple of years
younger than she was. Forever branding him ”not a man”. But today was the day it would all
change. However, becoming a man wasn't the only thing special he had planned for this day but
he'd prefer it if we left it at that.
People had very different opinions of when boys became men, Mr Brisby thought.
A man is not a man until his first sexual encounter, the obvious people would say.
A man is not a man until the age of 33, he'd also heard.
A man is not a man until he quaffles down six cans of stale lager a Monday afternoon to suppress
his lonely mundane life, others might say.
Mr Brisby on the other hand, claimed a man's not a man until he bought his first nose groomer.
Today was that day.
Well not actually, he bought it yesterday, but today was the day he’d actually use it.

He groomed his nose, put his pants on, buckled them tight with his orange belt, took his favorite
jacket, corrected his sleeves and topped it off with a nice blue hat. Like a man. Mr Brisby never
considered himself a hat-kind-of-guy, but it was funny how a small bald patch could work
wonders with one’s 30-year-old self-image of being too cool for hats. People always said that deep

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rooted behaviors where damn near impossible to change, but he couldn’t help to wonder if it all
just didn’t boil down to finding the right bald patch for every separate occasion. Then maybe
we’d all be feminists by now, conservative old men and green haired butch lesbians a like. Mr
Brisby was a man. He could tell by his male genitalia. There were other signs as well, but he
didn’t need any more proof than that. He didn’t hate being a man. He just didn’t particularly
love it either. Of the two existing ones, it wasn’t a bad lot to end up with. He’d heard of other
males, just like him, who did wonders with it. Building rockets, kicking ball amongst other men,
colonizing America, Iron Maiden. Being a man had its advantages, it did, but it sometimes ruined
the small things in life. Like the sensation of walking by a public kindergarten on a sunny
Tuesday afternoon without feeling like a child molesting pedophile.
The mirror reflected a handsome man.
A weird looking man, yes.
A man who didn't quite match, sure.
But still a man.
A man dressed for a mission.
With pants and everything.
He grazed his ring a bit with his index finger, feeling the cold familiar metal in between.
The other hand made its unconscious way over to start its unconscious clockwise twirl it usually
made whenever the first hand became aware of it. He turned it clockwise, as usual. Just like he
always did and had done since he'd put it on for the first time some four years ago. It was the
happiest day of his life. He was stupid in that way, and people often said his trail of thoughts
were a bit ”off” compared to others. To normal people. He had that weird disease where he meant
the words he said and thought that the words said to him also went by that same law.
He said "I do" without a doubt.
Not a second's.
And he said it with such a pride. Like the only thing standing in his way of finally winning
something in life was two tiny little words.
"I do".
He meant every letter of it.
And what a prize it was.
She asked him if he would love her until the end of days, and he said yes.
He didn't just say it. He promised it.
And if a promise can't be trusted, what can?
That was the way of Mr Brisby.

He let go off the ring and straightened his shirt instead.

Feeling his pockets, up and down, searching for the familiar sound of jingling keys muffled
against two pieces of fabric but heard nothing. He went around his apartment, following the
usual routine - on the table, behind the desktop lamp, on the floor, on the floor under his jeans
he never wore, back on the table again - and finally found them hiding behind the six cans of
lager from yesterday. He made his way out.

The Tuesday morning shun bright. Like it didn't have a care in the world.
He thought this a bit strange…

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In narratology class he had learned to trust the weather to somehow correspond and explain the
complex situation of the main protagonist’s sense of emotions. Or what had the bloody point
been in reading Jane Austen?
He thought about this for a moment to make some kind of sense of it. He looked for the hidden
symbolic gestures in the surroundings; like a half run over cat dragging its torn little body across
the cold pavement; reaching out a bloody pawn for help but instead getting its head smashed in
by a passing Coca-Cola Company truck. But he didn't see any sign of that or anything like it.
That's odd, he thought again.
He could only come to two conclusions for this matter:

The first conclusion he came up with was that his life was in fact NOT a novel and never had
been. And therefor couldn't be explained within the narrotologic rules of the universe that the
outside world reflected his inner world. How else could you explain this particular day?
The air stood still. A tiny little bunny skipped by with a pinkish fluffy fur just some two meters
away from him. Its tiny little eyes twinkled in the sun and before it passed him completely, it
stopped at his feet and wiggled its perfect little bunny tail; before it continued on its journey
across the lawn and disappeared behind a perfect visible rainbow.
This didn't fit at all, he thought again, but now with a little more resignation!
It's not only that it didn't fit. It's almost as if someone went out of his way to mock him. He'd
read about this phenomenon in narrotology as well. Yes. Could it be?
Skaz. A phenomenon on literature where the author, instead of hiding himself, "danced in front
of the reader". He looked around a bit for some sign of dancing. There were signs of it everywhere.
The leaves doing some kind of tango in the air; the subtle choreography of hats moving about
the lunch rush hour; and on the opposite side of the road a weird looking man doing some kind
of dancing now that you mentioned it.
He looked insane, though. Not insane in a way that a dancing straight white man looked insane
his first night out on the floor of a club that was predominantly homosexual; but insane in a way
that if his mind was a stable for horses; most of them would be empty, and the ones that weren’t
were by some reason filled with ostriches. He didn't know what to make of this information.
Something in him told him that it wasn't these kind of signs he should look for.

The other conclusion was that he was in fact in a novel, but the author didn't have the faintest
idea of what he was doing up there. He waited a bit to see if his trail of thoughts somehow
rubbed off on the writer; if by some miracle the air would thicken, and a bolt of lightning would
burst out of the bright blue sky.
It didn't. And he moved along.

Mr Brisby was a man trapped inside his own head from time to time.
A philosopher, some might say.
Often said by Mr Brisby himself.
He analyzed a lot, just to get closer to the core of things and to be able to put things in tiny little
boxes which he later used as some sort of personal guide map, that he later on would ask his
wife about if they corresponded with the general rules of life. They never did. And of late he had
begun to wonder if these boxes were the very same thing people would talk of when they pointed

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out that his trail of thoughts didn't match that of a normal person’s. He suspected that his wife,
if not in whole, but partly agreed with "people" in this matter.
The suspicion grew so vivid that Mr Brisby eventually asked her about it one day.
"It was exactly like that" she had answered.
But her thinking something like that didn't matter to him. To him, she was that thin line
between eternal happiness and inescapable misery. To him, she was that little piece of drift wood
floating far out at sea, separating him from the cold cold water of a lonely black ocean. And it
didn't matter what life, with its sadistic little hands, threw at him because when his arms found
his way around her waist and his chin rested gently on the jasmine bed of her hair, nothing in
the world could ever get underneath his skin.
To him, she was invaluable.
To him, she was home.
And not a wall in the world was unclimbable when she stood waiting on the other side.

It was a frightening thing but he had gotten so used to her company over these 9 years. Even
positive habits had a down side to them, he thought. Who knew. Who knew that life balanced
habits like two weights on a giant scale, and every time something became too positive the other
side would automatically slam against the ground with a thud, waiting for a clumsy foot to
accidentally kick it down while trying to dance. That was why Mr Brisby couldn't stand the cold
dead silence of a bright Tuesday afternoon. Because when that speck of silent afternoon daylight
mixed its dusty rays with the gentle humming of a refrigerator, he felt an immense feeling of
imprisonment. To him, this was the worst feeling in the whole world. He made a pact with God
in his youth, that IF the day would ever come, when a girl told him she loved him, he would
love her forever and until the end of days. He promised it. Not that he believed in God, really,
but the promise in itself was holy to him. And by some miracle, there she was. The one. Two
light pair of feet. A hand reaching down the deepest hole and pulling him out of his misery and
reclaiming the afternoon daylight. And before God and her, he promised to love her in sickness
and in health, just as she promised him.
This changed his whole life. He never felt alone a single day with her.
Not once.
Whenever he felt the familiar sensation of walls closing in on him, he knew that she was a quick
phone call away.
The phone was a peculiar little device. For some people it was the best invention in the world,
but for others it was the most despicable little thing ever made. A phone was nothing more than
the people in it, he'd come to terms with. People never saw it this way, at least not the ones he
talked to about this matter. But he'd seen the worst side of phone ownership.
A silent phone.
Sometimes the worst sound in the world is no sound at all.
People didn't realize this, he thought, because they never experienced it for themselves.
Winners could somewhat try to understand the feeling, but they would never truly understand
life on the losing side. Because they never called others, others always called them. 12 minutes
time for outgoing calls and 5000 hours of incoming. How would they know? Only someone who
sat alone listening to the nothingness of complete silence, staring at it, feeling the dead silence
choke everything in its way, day in and day out, would truly understand the dark side of a phone

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which never rang. Mr Brisby had always been one of them, but ever since he found his wife he'd
come to reevaluate phone ownership a bit. It was now a mean of hearing her voice. Whenever
he needed it he’d call, and two light pair of feet would sprint down from wherever and rescue him
at whenever. This was also the time when he decided on something to be "the best sound in the
world":
A ringing phone.
Some inventions never made any real sense to him but seemed to make sense to others. The
phone was one of them. He never seemed to really get a hang of how to use it properly.
He had considered that he, himself, was the idiot and not the entire world, but he wasn’t sure
yet. He just didn’t get why people would use it if they didn’t want anything in particular. Calling
just to call.

Mr Brisby had started taking a lot of walks in his life recently. They did hem good, he though,
and because he had read somewhere that being in constant movement had a positive effect on
the brain’s ability to keep the ideas coming. But also, he had found that the best inspiration for
figuring out how the world works was observing people in their idiotic ordinary everyday life,
and this kept his ideas fresh and his mind sane. On his route he had befriended a local squirrel
in one of the trees, some two hundred meters away from his apartment, which he always used to
observe to figure out if there still were similarities between human beings and animals. He
named him Cliffard. Mr Brisby liked Cliffard, and to some degree hated human beings. Hate
was a strong word, perhaps, but let’s just say he was still a bit skeptical. He just didn’t think that
human beings - as a species - was as smart as they claimed to be and that there was evidence for
it.

For starters, he didn’t like that the words ”animal” and ”human being” were separated both in
language and in people’s ideas about their own greatness. ”Men are animals” he thought in a
voice that sounded a lot like belonging to a person thinking a little too high about herself being
above biology. ”This is the thing separating human beings from animals” he heard another voice
saying. He wondered if humanity was so eager to prove its disconnection to animals that they
completely forgot that a person going from house to house telling everyone how sane he is
probably isn’t.
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Someone above biology, that’s who.
In a way Mr Brisby thought that this trait was the same thing that would end humanity one day.
Or so he hoped. This stupid little blind spot. If animals are bound to their biological instincts -
and ”animal” is something that you as a human being most definitely do not want to be associated
with when accidentally following your instincts - then human beings must be above biological
according to their logic. In a way, human beings were too smart and too dumb for their own
good. Because If we were the smartest, how could we be wrong? The dangerous thing, he thought,
was that humanity always needed to prove its greatness to itself. Like an insecure child trying to
prove that the squiggly lines on a piece of paper was in fact an elephant and a crocodile if you
just looked at it a little tilted to the left. And if you couldn’t, you were probably not tilting enough.

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Cliffard didn’t care about greatness. And why would squirrels care about being great or who was?
They didn’t. So who were humans competing against and did these other ”they” even know they
were competing? Mr Brisby didn’t think that human beings were above biology though. Why
would we be? Why would we be the only thing above biology on this planet? And the best proof
of it was that we were trying our absolute best to change our biology and our instincts. Like a
man who just knocked on someone’s door just to tell them how sane he is and proving it by
showing his medical journal in a sane and calm manner. Just like a sane person.
But mankind wouldn’t stop at that level, we also had to go to extreme measures to disprove our
connection to biology by introducing the concept of bad moral and shaming. The meaning of life
to continue the survival of your species and your own genes were in some sort of modern conflict
with a wife who had to excuse her instincts to have a family and to look out for her offspring.
Every other species on the planet had survival of its species and survival of their own genes as
some sort of meaning of life, but without being told to feel ashamed about themselves not being
at the office. Why are you here spending time with your kids when you could be out dancing to
techno?
Even though he didn’t actually believe in God, he sometimes wondered if this made him angry.
If he created life with a purpose and one of them refused to follow it. He wondered if an anti-
virus software would wake up one day, deciding that his purpose from now on would be
something else. Hunting viruses and keeping a clean computer was for other software. From now
on, his new purpose was to correct grammar. If they wanted to be stuck in their programming,
fine, but he had places to be and bigger fish to fry. He had bigger things in store for his life.
Stories to read, sentences to judge and grammar to underline. And he’d be damned if he’d let a
silly thing like mechanics tell him that every fiber of his being was created to search suspicious
looking log-files for intrusions. Are you still hunting trojans, he would say to other anti-virus
software, like some silly anti-virus software. When you could be out dancing to techno. Yet no
other form of life was ever present at the night clubs. Bees were still producing honey in their
little bee hives, trees were still dropping acorns in forest, birds where still vomiting food in each
other’s mouths to feed their young ones and somewhere between a Mc Donalds and a Law Firm
two 47 year old human beings were standing in line in the freezing cold talking about how much
they longed for a straight 4/4 on a floor packed with other drunks. Because somehow we knew
better. Mr Brisby didn’t mind equality, he fought for it himself. He just wasn’t completely sure
if sociological explanations covered every aspect of why men felt a little emotionally detached to
a small lump of useless flesh that he, himself, hadn’t carried around for nine months before it
demanded his undivided attention and unquestionable love. And when he got the urge to spend
some time at the office instead of looking into the eyes of someone he didn’t quite know yet, he
wouldn’t be most despicable monster that ever lived, but in a way just a biological animal and a
mere product of Gods stupid plan.
That is why he liked to observe Cliffard. To see Gods programming in action. Cliffard, always
took the same route down the branches and down to the ground to collect the acorns spread out
on the ground. And in time, Mr Brisby would make it his own routine to collect some of his own
and put them in a pile on the ground beside the tree. This day was no exception. He placed them
neatly in a pile a few steps in front of himself, and waited for Clifford to come down. To greet
him on this day of special days.

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Mr Brisby looked up at Cliffard, and Cliffard looked down at Mr Brisby. Mr Brisby looked back,
right into its small little shiny squirrel eyes, sparkling with the innocence of a new born child,
glistening like the first frost on a lake in late November. It took a tiny little step with its tiny
little squirrel leg - one at a time - its fury little feet moving as carefully as a thief trying to sneak
out with the King’s jewels. With every step, its majestic tail stood tall and proud - with every
little straw of fur waving in the wind; shifting its color in every nuance of a fur crossing from
summer to winter - soft and fuzzy like it was swirled into existence by one of those cotton candy
machines you used to watch at the carnivals as a naive kid. When he moved his head, his brown
little squirrel ears flickered in every direction, like an angry man jerking his antennas trying to
find the lost reception of the second half of a Liverpool game he watched while his wife was out
dancing somewhere he didn’t want to think about. Cliffard stopped in his track, and positioned
himself on his hind legs, pushing himself upright and flexing his unimpressive body upwards
the unexpecting autumn sky. The sky didn’t seem to take any notice of him, and he didn’t seem
to take any notice of the sky. They were like two strangers enjoying each other’s silent company
in an almost empty airport bar in the middle of the night, waiting for a runaway flight switching
a newly found self-doubt with a week’s drinking in Bangkok. In an upright position, Mr Brisby
could see its squirrel front body taking on the coldness head first without a care in the world,
for under that kind of fur not even the coldness of lost love would enter. Not even the cold
shower of a million broken dreams would make it past its coat and reach its tiny heart. For it
was an armor; sturdier than iron and steadier than a mountain. And if someone thought that a
metaphorical concept like shattered love could freeze a squirrel heart, they were literally out of
their freakin’ mind. Cliffard took another small step forward on the upper branch before he
stopped. Stopped very suddenly. Like a man just remembering he might have left the steak in
the oven; the very same steak he’d spent the last three hours preparing in advance for his first
date in 9 years. But then taking another fury step forward because he remembered that steaks
will survive a little extra time on those type of low temperatures. In worst case, the pre-course
bouillabaisse would save him.

This was taking forever, Mr Brisby thought…

Damn new age writers with their adjective packed noun phrases. What ever happened to the
good ol’ days when men were men, women were women, and people used prepositional phrases
and active verbs? When it was all done in one swift move. Like a band aid. Cliffard lept off the
branch, bounced on another, under the thick one, over the stubby one, through the leaves, across
the lawn and jumped up on to the pile of acorns.
Touché, Mr Brisby thought. And he prepositioned himself along.

Mr Brisby understood the concept of compositional motivation. He did. To some degree, telling a
story put certain demands upon its listeners and one of those demands was their attention. It
would be a pretty long and boring story if it didn’t keep to the important stuff, wouldn’t it? And
could you actually call for someone’s attention and tell them something completely useless that
didn’t have any intention of bringing the point home? Maybe so… Yet he also hated the concept
of compositional motivation because that meant that everything in a story had to be a piece of
the puzzle, because otherwise it wouldn’t be part of it. If puzzle creators gave you 1032 pieces to
a 1000-pieces puzzle, then 32 pieces would be useless for the picture. What was the point of

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Cliffard, he thought… Mr Brisby was just so tired of knowing about compositional motivation
sometimes, because it ruined narratives for him. A Hollywood crime movie running for 1 hour
and 30 minutes wouldn’t have time to have useless scenes in it. So every time someone said ”Is
this a picture of your daughter?” this meant that she would most likely be kidnapped somewhere
around 1 hour in, otherwise they would have cut that scene from the narrative in the editing
room. But eeeeeverything gotta fill a function. Fill it or cut it! And if the ending can’t be reached
with the functions you have at the moment; use compositional motivation to add one. That is
why J.K. Rowling created a supernatural world, with witches and wizards going to a magical
school full of wonders, where the great hall is snowing on the inside, where house elves instantly
make roasted chicken appear, where paintings are singing, and staircases are moving, where cups
get turned into cats and castles have reappearing hidden rooms - but where they still use regular
plumbing for the toilets… You mean to tell me that a hippogriff can befriend a slow half giant,
but they can’t magically make poop disappear??? But without the plumbing, the big snake
wouldn’t have any pipes to slither around in in the second book. Everything else could be
transfigured into anything else. But not this. Not poo. Because J.K. Rowling made sure that the
only thing impossible to fix magically were Ronald Weasley’s dress robes before the great ball,
and poop. Poop need to be transported in pipes large enough for an Obelisk and traditional dress
robes would teach kids about shameful poverty.

Knowing the concept behind compositional motivation ruined the magical thing about reading.
Even about a magical place like Hogwarts. Knowledge was a tricky thing. Deceitful, in some
sense. Mr Brisby, even though an educated man, didn’t like the idea of every kind of knowledge
because you had to separate facts and science from “knowing something” since knowing
something was something cognitive; not printings on a paper. Society had this big idea that ”to
know” was the opposite of stupidity which was why we in modern day forced kids for twelve
years to learn things through public school systems, just because we thought that ”to know” was
the solution to everything.
Some time ago he’d heard a story from his wife’s friend’s husband, telling them about a barbecue.
On this particular barbecue he’d come across a fantastically tasting sauce that someone in the
dinner party had whipped up and placed on the dinner table. He had tried it, and had instantly
fallen in love with it. He had dipped his meat in it and savored the taste. He dipped his potatoes
in it. His vegetables in it. He dipped everything on his plate in it until everything on his plate
had been reduced to nothing. And before seconds, he had worked up an interest in the sauce so
big that he just couldn’t let a taste like this pass him by. So, he worked up the courage to ask
who had made it, and if he could possibly get to know what was in it before he went for his
refill.
Creme fresh and salt, someone said.
And the same moment that ”Creme fresh and salt” went from someone’s mouth to his ears, the
magic spell that had fogged his senses completely disappeared. Vanished. Creme fresh and salt?
How could it be?
He took seconds, but he ate it dry.

Mr Brisby liked that little anecdote because the same theme applied to everything. On our stupid
quest for facts we’d ruined our sense of wonder. There was nothing magical about light bulbs;

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they were just mere electrons reacting to tungsten and argon inside of a vessel made out of finely
compressed and polished sand. No one noticed the fact that there WERE FUCKING LIGHT
TRAPPED IN A TRANSPARENT BALL!! Thanks to science, nothing was better left alone.
Everything was to be dissembled, looked at and explained until every last drop of magic was
squeezed out of it. But oblivious was sometimes a blessing, and knowledge sometimes came with
a prize. The more knowledge you had about something, the less magical it became.
Impressive, sure.
But magical?
No…
Something new always dazzled people regardless of the field. Not because ”new” meant they
hadn’t seen it before, but because it was a thing that someone hadn’t ruined with knowledge yet.
It was untouched. That was why the same magic trick could mesmerize the same people over and
over again. Even though they had seen the very same trick a million times. For how does he do
it? Was it real magic? Jack of cloves, again?? Surely something like that couldn’t be done in the
world as we know it?? Until someone explained that there was a midget in a black body suit
holding a mirror, aaaall the way to the left on the black stage, creating an illusion. And there
was no reason to ever buy tickets to see the magician and the mirror-midget ever again. Some
things were better left untouched. That was why we sometimes lied to each other. Lying was not
only to deceit one another, but also because the second someone said ”…because I hate the way
you laugh” that thing could never be un-learned. Our scientific ideology proclaimed that
knowledge would somehow set modern mankind free, but Mr Brisby sometimes wondered if it
rather imprisoned people. Or if ”to know” was the same thing as to be free, he’d rather be
obliviously unaware.

Summer had ended but it wasn’t that far gone. It could be seen everywhere if you only knew
where to look. The holidays were over and semi-depressed people were once again filling the
streets and then disappearing again as if nothing had happened. There were a wide variety of
dresscodes walking around where some started too early, some waited too long and some didn’t
seem to know which side to chose. Changes were hard sometimes, but they were an unavoidable
part of life non the less. One thing he noticed lately was people’s sudden interest in his opinion
about dancing. Not dancing in general, he learned, but his opinion about himself doing it on
local night clubs. He had always seen local night clubs as something he’d never have to do ever
again. But he was getting the feeling of late that the quite life of a non-dancer was exclusively
for the same people who owned kids. Unfortunately, he had never quite understood how he
would respond to people’s question about dancing. It’s not that he didn’t understand the question
itself, but was just that he didn’t think people understood the word ”dancing”. In a way he had
the same feelings towards dancing as people had to koriander. He both loved it and hated it. Not
coriander, though, he loved it. But dancing. And even if you would draw parallels to coriander,
if someone asks you if you like coriander your answer should be ”which one?” and your
immediate follow up question would be ”and to what?” before ending with ”will it come with a
set of bottled wine?”. Otherwise it would be as too say you like ”food”. And if people couldn’t
even cooperate with words as simple as dancing and coriander, he sometimes wondered if people
would ever understand a word like “justice” and “freedom”. Or how people would understand
each other at all. For real. Not that people didn’t want to or tried their best, but that they couldn’t.

11
Could. Not.
For how could anyone understand anyone when there were no absoluteness in ”words”. Even
words as absolute as “yes” and “no” seemed to be subjectively interpreted. And the concept of
language was just one barrier standing in the way. The mere physics of people made people
different as well.
He noticed this, because he had recently started stealing company from one of his fellow
classmates to and from school. He suspected she knew, and didn’t mind, but he couldn’t be sure.
He thought that, from an outside perspective they were two very similar individuals heading
down the same road, going to the same school and attending the same University program. The
way to school was a path consisting of a very short distance of asphalt, leading into a short walk
in a planted public garden, before reaching the school. He liked her company, but he sometimes
got the sense of them never really walking the same five hundred meters, even though the path
they walked were in fact the exact same five hundred. But since her 1, 60m just failed to reach
above the garden hedges, she didn’t see the open field on the other side, like he did. To her the
garden path was probably narrow and imprisoning, but for him it was a light decorated path
with a sense of freedom with a nice view. Since she was a lot shorter than him she would most
likely direct her eyes more upwards towards the sky and all the trees and leaf works hanging
over the path; while he - with his 1,8m - rarely looked up since his field of vision stretched above
and beyond the open field. It wasn’t that he didn’t notice the trees and leaf work, but since he
was color blind he didn’t really see the point in looking. To him, all her adjectives about cherry
blossoms was just a smudgy canvas of a smeary brownish grey. Whenever she talked about the
colors of spring on their way to school, he insisted they would also talk about the scents and
explosion of fragrance. But since she was allergic to pollen her garden path work was often a
race against time with a clogged-up nose, and more like a struggle to inhale as little allergens as
possible before she reached the end. He always told her to slow down since he didn’t mind the
pollen. Not he didn’t feel sympathy for her condition, but since he was a little bit older than her,
his hip had started to ache to the extent that every step he took hurt. Where she said she liked
to feel the wind in her face, he couldn’t really get the same sensation because of the pain who
called for his attention much like a nagging house wife in the one of the nicer suburbs calling
for her lazy husband to ”once in a while help out at home BEFORE she asked him to”. Every
step she took was as light as a feather, leading her to the unraveling of life, her meaning and
her everything; it was the path towards the future she handpicked for herself and the identity
that would define her whole being. But to him every step was more or less a path he didn’t really
have a map planned for, because the map he already had never got him anywhere and was
deemed useless. For him, it wasn’t a path towards something new, it was a path away from
something old. If their path was a board game, her every step would be the very first steps on to
an amazing adventure with quest cards, rewards and treasures. If their path was a board game,
for him, someone else would’ve picked the game, put him down somewhere in the middle facing
the completely wrong direction and not bothering to correct it before tossing the dice and moving
him towards somewhere in the vicinity of the area that was actually constructed for the quest
cards. In a way, when they walked next to each other, they walked the exact same five hundred
meters - but physically every meter was completely different. And if two people like them couldn’t
really understand each other, how could anyone?

12
His wife had always hated this way of thinking, that the only way to truly understand someone
was to listen to what they were saying and understand the pattern in how they are thinking. He
had tried a million times to ask her if she could repeat herself but in a different way, or if she
could answer the same question where the question was asked from a slightly different angle. It
had usually ended with two light pair of feet storming off somewhere to where his weren’t. But if
words were subjective and the mere physics made people view the same world from different
positions – how else would you do it?
-

-
Chapter I

H e woke up.
18.
Well if I’d snooze a bit, it would probably be 17 and a half, he thought.
17 and a quarter on a good day…
…but 17 would be stretching it.
He pressed the button and disappeared again.
He woke up a bit later.
He didn’t know for how long, and he thought for a while if he would even bother looking. Time,
he thought, was for people who had places to be; people to meet; things to do. In his early life
he’d come to terms that time was usually for Mondays until Fridays, but weekends rarely
demanded usage of such devices as a clock. In that sense, weekends were the worst. 18 was a lot
to manage. Working days had about 6 hours. 7 tops. But since he had started studying all days
were pretty much the same. Weekends and work days a like. He lay for a while staring at the
Monday ceiling, thinking about a strategy. Just to make some small change in some small way,
to change it up a bit. Try something else and see how it felt. Maybe do it backwards.
?kcirt eht od dluow taht ebyaM
...
…t’ndid tI
He decided to switch back.
The ceiling looked like it usually did. Yet, everytime he looked he tried his best to see something
new hiding in the surface.
Maybe if he changed the way the words looked it would make the day a bit more interesting.
Like as if the words were thought in some falsetto v
oice, or something…
No?
No, it didn’t really do anything for him either.
Mr Brisby didn’t like this ceiling that much. No, compared to his old ceiling from when he was
young, this ceiling was as boring as a cow on a meadow. His old ceiling was of that wooden type
where everytime he looked at it some new figure, some new line connecting a dot with a splurt

13
with a thingie created a face. Or a dinosaur. His old ceiling from when he was young had that
magical cloud feeling to it where on a Monday it was a stegosaurus and on a Tuesday evening
just before noon switched to afternoon the dinosaur had Pollocked into a mess. And every night
when he finally got to go to sleep he tilted his head a little to see if the evenings painting hid
something in the chaos. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t.
But he hated these smooth white plasterboard ceilings.
He decided to switch language. Switch it and evaluate it later.

Ibland fann han sig fastna i sin säng hela dagar i sträck utan någon större meningen med att kliva upp
från första början. För vad var egentligen poängen med att kliva upp? Livet var inte ett dugg bättre utanför
sängen. Vissa dagar tog det fem försök innan han tog steget ur. Oftast som oftast fann han sig fast under
täcket, som om det vägde 200kg. Han lyssnade ofta på det subtila suset från vad han bara kunde gissa var
ventilationshålet. Bakom det hördes en svag ljudmatta långt långt borta av bilar som trängdes med andra
bilar på motorvägen, på väg mot nåt annat. Kanske nåt bättre? Kanske på väg till nåt dom hatade. På väg,
oavsett. Han visste att det fanns poddar och musik för att slippa denna sortens tystnad, men han kunde
inte förmå sig att göra nånting. Han bara låg där likgiltigt och väntade. På ingenting. I sängen kunde
han åtminstone, även för en liten stund, inbilla sig om att dagen inte bara börjat än och det var därför
det var som det var. Att den här känslan av att ”man får väl sätta igång så man får nåt gjort” bara
halvprokrastinerades lite en slö och ledig förmiddag innan man tog tag i dagen. Han försökte leva kvar i
den känslan så länge han kunde, för samtidigt visste han att den lilla illusionen skulle spricka så fort han
bestämt sig för att faktiskt kliva upp.

Gipstaket låg obrytt som om ingenting. Han hade legat och tittat på alla rektangulära skivor en miljon
gånger, men han hade aldrig räknat dom. Även fast det inte kunde vara mer än 40. Men han hade klarat
dagarna förut, precis som att han skulle klara det denna gång. Och gången efter den, och gången efter
den. För vad var alternativet? Rummet låg alltid och lurpassade. Som en leopard lurpassade på en
förbipasserande gasell. Den smög sig närmare, som om den visste att personen i sängen bara var ljudet av
en kvist ifrån att inse att det var dags att klä på sig sin sämsta stridsrustning och gå in i samma krig som
den utkämpande varje dag vid den här tiden. Det var en slags tävling där den klassiska vinsten var mer
som en förlust. Han tävlade på ett sätt för att ovillkorligt få fortsätta tävla. Det enda slutet på tävlingen
var egentligen att förlora och därmed vinna; att bara en dag äntligen få befinna sig så långt från en prispall
som bara gick; att gå förlorande ur allt och bara få slippa. Han längtade så innerligt efter en riktig förlust.
Men varje gång han sneglade mot dörren, och något satte ner sin klumpiga fot på en av livets torra pinnar,
tog han sina gasellben och sprang allt vad han kunde. Han sprang trots att han visste precis vad som
väntade i säkerhet längst bort. Hans enda lilla tröst i allt var att det inte gick att förlora utan att tävla,
och därför försökte han. En korkad mans hopp och åratal av övning.

Han vrider och vänder på sig. Sträcker ut och vräker ut sig. Men det oundvikliga är på väg, som alltid.
Han kan känna det i luften. Lugnet före stormen. Han kan höra ljudet av det, som om hela världen är
en läktare som skriker med all sin kraft, och när han väl bestämmer sig för att sträcka sig efter klockan
och se vad den är så är det som om allting kommer starta. Lamporna skulle tändas, sirenerna blinka, och
strålkastarna riktas mot mitten där en ensam obetydlig slagskämpe helt utan några som helst vapen står
som en obefintlig liten prick på en oändligt stor arena. Där universums största Colosseum breder ut sig
från här till stjärnstopp av tomma platser och stolar som alla skriker med sådan tystnad att det enda som
får panikångesten att stilla sig är att springa för sitt liv.
Han sträcker sig mot klockan.
17 och ett halvt, tänker han för sig själv och känner ångesten växa.

14
Rummet börjar krympa, som om det visste. Problemet är att han vet precis vad som krävs för att besegra
allt och gå segrandes ur, men hur mycket han än försökte går det inte att vinna mot ett svärd om livet
bara delade ut skosnören. Men ändå kastas han in i striden. Svärdet flyger förbi hans vänstra arm och
han kastar sig åt sidan. Han tar sitt skosnöre, viftar med det febrilt och han hinner precis undan innan
rummet attackerar igen. Det krymper och krymper, tills dess att det snart bara är hälften av
handlingsutrymmet kvar. Han tar sitt skosnöre och slår mot väggarna, men ingenting händer. Inte ens
några futtiga märken i den våfflade tapeten. Han ser på sitt snöre, vars flätade lilla kropp ligger som en
vissnad blombukett i handen. Viftandes och parerandes ålar han runt, allt eftersom spetsarna flyger mot
hans gråa örngott och han vet att hans enda försvar är att byta miljö; att kasta sig ut till kökets väntande
armar och fundera ut en ny strategi. Med paniken i halsen och hopplösheten i luften håller han andan,
tar tag i gårdens skrynkliga t-shirt, slänger sig mot den stängda sovrumsdörren och fyller lungorna med
nytt från det stilla köket som fortfarande låg lika orörd som perforeringen av en obruten toalettrulle.

Egentligen var inte vardagen så dramatisk som det kan verka vid första anblick. Åtminstone inte sett
utifrån. Men på ett sätt var det exakt det som var problemet också. Det blev en slags paradox, där tystnaden
överröstade alla ljud. Där den totala avsaknaden av dramatik gjorde hela verkligheten till ett enda stort
dramatiskt slagfält. Sett utifrån var det egentligen dött som i graven när en man plötsligt öppnar en
sovrumsdörr, halvt iklädd en skrynklig t-shirt och kliver in i köket, men det är för att folk inte hör tystnad
som han gör. Han hör tystnaden ända in i märgen. Han hör tystnaden i det dova mummel av människor
som pratar genom fyra väggar någon annanstans. Han hör den i tystnaden av att inte höra något mummel
fyra väggar bort någon annanstans. Han hör det i det konstanta flödet av vatten som stilla vandrar genom
vattenledningarna och elementen där det ligger som en ljudmatta uppe på ljudet av absolut tystnad. Men
framförallt, hör han det i ljudet av ett varsamt brummande kylskåp precis när klockan slagit runt kl 11
och han inte står ut en endaste liten sekund till. Kylskåpet brummar misstänksamt i den tysta
förmiddagsluften. Det dånar, över allt annat, och kväver varenda liten impuls att göra nånting annat än
att bara stirra likgiltigt ut i ingenstans och försöka hålla sig borta från att titta hur mycket tid det var
kvar. Det här var också en anledning till att han inte kunde äga en klocka på väggen. Det enda lilla
övertaget han hade mot tiden var att han inte behöver veta var den befinner sig. När han blickar rakt ut
rummet, där dammet dansar i förmiddagssolen, så gör han det med all ovetskap om hur sakta tiden går.
Att faktiskt se tiden inte gå framåt skulle vara för mycket för honom att klara av.
Över tid hade han insett att skosnöret som livet gett honom att försvara sig med aldrig skulle hjälpa
honom. Han vet det idag, precis som att han innerst inne kände det redan då, även om han då var för
ung för att förstå det fullt ut. Han visste inte riktigt heller vad livet förväntade sig av en liten kille utan
mening i den åldern. Om han skulle klara sig var han tvungen att komma på överlevnadsstrategier men
samtidigt kändes det lite orättvist att kräva att en pojke skulle ha ett sett av verktyg så tidigt i livet. Ett
verktyg, som han tackade sin lyckliga stjärna för, var hans förmåga att stänga av sig själv genom att vandra
in i sig själv. Det var som att det bodde en liten miniatyr Honom som checkade ut, satte skeppet på
autopilot och tog trappen in i det djupaste av sig själv. Där nystade han i knäppa filosofiska tankar, blandat
med idiotiska funderingar om livet och allt. Då, precis som nu, hatade han nog kanske söndagarna mest
av alla dagar på hela veckan. Hatade dom. På söndagar kröp människor in i sin lugna lilla dvala från
sina annars fartfyllda liv. Dom storkokade inför veckan, pratade om gårdagens bio, planerade en ny nästa
vecka utan minsta tanke på dom som stirrade paralyserat ut över en ocean av tystnad, kylskåpsbrus och
meningslöshet; där en människa guppade runt på ett ensamt hav med vatten så långt ögat kunde nå och
utan varken paddel eller åra. Söndagar var en 18 timmar lång stillastående flotte som aldrig aldrig aldrig
slutade.

Hmmm..
No…

15
It didn’t do it for him.
He switched back.
He didn’t know it back then, as he knew it looking from where he is today - and he wished he
could have told his former self somehow - that one day it would all be over, and that he could
just sit back and relax for a bit. One day two light pair of feet would come and they would help
him paddle the raft and plan their destination. They would go around the world, see things he
never would have dreamed of, eat things he never would have known, and before he’d even
realized it: Sundays would be the 18 that always ended too soon.

Hope was such an amazing tool, he thought. If there was even the slightest prickle of light
somewhere faaaaaaaaaaar away at the end of the tunnel, people kept on walking. The dangerous
thing was when there was a tunnel at the end of the light, when everywhere you looked there
where only more tunnel, and more tunnel, and more tunnel, and more tunnel, until one day you
just stopped dead, wondering what the point was. Mr Brisby knew that there was a light in the
long dark tunnel, because he had met her. He had seen her lite footsteps treading alongside his.
Two light pair of feet trailing out the path, like two stars on an inky black sky. However, Mr
Brisby had learned long ago that when facing a tunnel with no light at the end of it, the best
thing to do was to replace the light with something else. It wasn’t real hope, but it was something
almost like it. It was hop. You had to have strategies for hop, he thought. And hop could be
anything that kept you walking, kept you sane and pushed away those little thoughts asking what
the point was four thousand times a day. Nothing was too small or too dumb to be a strategy for
hop. People often skipped the 30 second count down between episodes on Netflix, but not him.
To others these 30 seconds were reason enough to launch yourself over the living room table to
avoid it, but to Mr Brisby they were 30 seconds of waiting for something. Something to happen.
30 seconds with a purpose. They were 30 seconds of hop. He never pressed to skip the intro
neither. Why would he? Anything that got the clock moving forwards, even for a second, was
something worth keeping. He had recently made a wise call to never eat in front of the TV again.
Not because he didn’t want to, but because dinner and TV were two separate sparks of light so
why would you merge them into one? Christmas and birthday on the same day, no thank you.
Dinner and TV at the same time? A fool’s mistake. He sometimes envied the people who had
the good fortune to unwrap a Whopper in front of Game of Thrones without a care in the world,
while he himself watched the credits of who performed the Spanish dubs. Or the people that
decided to celebrate their graduation and their new job in one sitting because it would ”save
time”. They were the same people wondering where their time went and complained about the
days being too short.

He glances again.
17 and a quarter.
Only 2 until lunch.
120 small minutes until something brakes the silence. The pinkish refrigerator hums a
mischievous tune standing in the corner glaring at him. Mr Brisby glares back. It sings a tune
Mr Brisby doesn’t recognize. Must be new, he thinks, scratching his thin facial hair not thick
enough to be called a beard.

16
He walks to it and opens it. He didn’t know why, because he knows exactly what is in there. The
little light bulb lights up and two water drops run from the top of the top shelf to the bottom of
the bottom - slowly - past an old butter package he never gets rid of since he hates breakfast. No
milk since he tries his best to keep the peace between cows and humanity. A big pot with the
stew he made yesterday. The middle shelf has a jar of lingonberry jam which absolutely do not
belong on the middle shelf since it is a product Type C: long lasting and used once every other
month. He moves it to the top shelf, wrinkles his nose and scratches his ”beard”. With his other
hand he crams the six cans of cheap alcohol into the corner when his ring accidentally hits the
glass bottles and the sound bounces around between the narrow pinkish corridors before it slows
down, stops and dies out somewhere around a Creme Fresh. Yes, he is a hypocrite.
He wonders if she had called, and checks his phone in disappointment.

Mr Brisby had two foundations of hop at the end of the dark tunnel that was his days. The first
one was food. Food was a great thing in many ways because there were so many things that had
to be fixed around it. For starters: you had to put on clothes and leave the apartment to get it.
Any reason to put on pants and deodorant was a good reason. Then you had to cook it. Chop it,
fry it, try it. Then eating it with a side order of doing the dishes afterwards. Eating was a thing
he really enjoyed in life and that was why he spent a lot of time making sure that his meals were
fantastic. His meals were his hope. Preparing a 5-hour stew had saved a lot of mundane Mondays,
that was for sure. For just as the 30-second-count-down on Netflix, a 5-hour stew gave it all some
sense of delayed meaning. It wasn’t just a meal; it was a journey.
He could almost forgive the pinkish piece of crap for singing since it helped him store his hope.
Almost.
Sometimes he talked to himself, asking himself questions. He’d always thought this a strange
trait ever since he read The Old Man and the Sea back in school but he’d come to think that the
loony old loner had a point. It wasn’t only that a man would go crazy if he didn’t get to speak to
anyone, but also that there were such things as vocal chords and they needed exercising.
Especially in these chatting days. And if not, they would probably oxidize in due time and every
time he’d try to speak it would crackle like the volume knob on an old stereo. Or in two years:
on his expensive firewire sound card that the cunts at Apple had made useless with their new
Thunderbolt ports.

He found himself stuck, staring into the freezing fridge air. But it didn’t really matter. If you
can’t beat them join them, he says and closes the pinkish door. He hums along with it. Sometimes
he liked to lay his hum juuuuust above the refrigerator’s to create that horrible sensation of
friction between two terrible notes that felt like nails risping on the inside of your skull. He
checks his phone again to see if she still hadn’t called, or if someone hadn’t written anything…
anything at all… but there is nothing. His fingers drum a stressful little hymn on the kitchen
sink which, before he knew it, turns into a race between two horses galloping towards the finish
line. Or is it finnish line? No. Finish line.
Too early to eat and too early to take a shower. God, he hates these hours before 2 o’clock. They
are the worst. He stops his jamming with the fridge and goes for the radio. Maybe there is
something he could sing along with that takes his mind off of things. He turns the crackling
knob.

17
 - stated 126 security personnel were killed and around 70 others were injured, when the
Talibans attacked a military checkpoint in Maidan Shar in Afghanistan
- The assault began when an attacker rammed a vehicle full of explosives in the compound,
while two other attackers stormed the compound and opened gunfire, before being killed.
- A Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility and stated 190 personnel were…

The news… Why is it always the news whenever you turn on the radio? Always always always.
It never fails. Timing is a tricky thing. Who knows how it works and who was in control of it.
That is why every time someone sat down with two pieces of toast in front of a TV it instantly
switched to commercials. And why every time your parents happened to join your two pieces of
toast, the commercials were always about a new formula for vaginal creme.

- in the ethnic clashes in Kongo between Lendu and Hema tribes in the volatile Ituri
Province.
- The attackers were mostly from the Lendu tribe, with the attacks primarily targeting Hema
civilians, but police officers were also targeted.

How many times had he seen that damn vaginal creme commercial with his dad… He couldn’t
even look at a piece of toast now a days without picturing a dry vagina.

- Sudan
- Unarmed protestors were attacked by security forces and paramilitary forces during a sit-in.
- The opposition states that 118 people were killed, but the authorities put…

And every time he saw it he wondered why the product name had ”vagina” in it. From a hook-
kind-of-perspective he understands why. No one would forget the product name, but doesn’t it
pose a problem when asking for Vagisanal at the counter? And isn’t it enough that they had
”Vagina” in it, do they also have to have ”anal”?

- Pieht Tuing and have left 200 people homeless.

- The massive raining that have been going on non-stop since last week has finally stopped, but
not without leaving most of the city in ruins and desperate people stranded. The Vietnamese
president sends his…

Or is it not too early for a shower? He never understood why people showered in the morning,
before work rather than after work. It just made no practical sense to clean yourself in the
morning, then go to bed dirty from a full day’s work. Or is that the reason why people washed
their bed sheets a trillion times a month? Had no one ever thought that if you shower after work
/ before bed time it also meant that your bed didn’t get treated as toilet paper for your body every
night. And if your sheets were clean, you probably wouldn’t need to shower in the morning. Or
was the shower to wake up a little in the early mornings? But people drank coffee, didn’t they?
Did they really need a shower AND coffee?

18
 - It’s 11.30 and time for the local news.
- The Conservative Party will be holding a rally on the town square today as the…

17, he thought
He turns the volume off and it crackles all the way down to nothing.
This didn’t really do it for him either. And still 17 left. Maybe 16 and a half if he stretches it a
little.
He decides it is time to switch it up again. Switch it and see if he likes it.
To see if it would do anything…

19
20
21
22
Mr Brisby stands up and revisits the bedroom, just to get away a bit from the humming. He
walks over to the drawer and looks for a new t-shirt. They all look the same, so he takes one at
random and shoves the drawer back in, walks over to his bed and lies down again.
1..
2,3,4,5
6… 7…8 9 10 11
12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20
21, 22, 23, 24.
What about the halves?
Should I count them as one, or halves…
Fuck.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 6, 7, 8, 9,
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
the halves are halves but the thirds are nothing
19..
19 and 6 halves
25 then
What do you know…

He lies for while listening to the traffic and stares at the ceiling.
Is this all there is to life?
He looks at his phone but there are no messages.
Scrolling down he sees someone looking to rent out an apartment.
A fortune for 20 square feet.
His brother is interested in an event nearby.
Candlemass at the theater.
No thank you.
A bike saddle with nails on it, lying on a green floor.
Someone claims it to be German.
Another one renting out her flat, but even more expensive than the last one.
Someone seemed to agree.
It was nice though.
But not worth the cost.
A sponsored message from VIPdaters wants me to find love online.
They look Russian.
Very Important Person daters…
Sounds Russian as well.
Her eyes are a little too far apart and his hairline seem a bit unnatural.
Are they even real people?
Some old acquaintance has a birthday.
Someone I haven’t talked to in 6 years
and someone I haven’t talked to in 8 years wishing him a balloon, a cake and a horse
He seems to have gotten a lot of wishes though
What the hell has happened to internet?

23
Is there nothing more to it than Russian dating commercials and greedy people?

Is this what life is supposed to be..

Honestly…
19 and 6 halves, and a bike saddle with nails on it on a green carpet?
…
He feels the anxiety from before phasing out.
How it slowly tries to shift to passive indifference again.
How did life come to this?
What kind of life is this, really…?
…this is not living
I don’t know what this is.
He stares at the ceiling thinking about that he, himself, never had a large number of followers
in life even though he is actually a pretty polite, humble and funny guy. The sad thing is that he
knows why, but every time he tries to fix it he struggles with the strong sensation that it isn’t
worth it in the long run. He had been in so many conversations and met so many people in his
life to have figured out why his phone so rarely rang and why, for 9 years, she had been the only
exception. It all boiled down to ”the purpose of communication”. As he sees it, there are 6 main
purposes to why we even invented a language at all: arguing, reasoning, telling, describing,
instructing and socializing. Others seemed to love communication with the end purpose of telling
and socializing, while he himself usually liked reasoning. Unfortunately, he himself hates
communication with an end purpose of telling and socializing, while others seemed to have no
interest in the art of reasoning and discussions. He just doesn’t see the point in sitting next to
another human being, using ”telling” as a main purpose. It isn’t a real conversation, instead it is
two people talking against each other, but not with each other. He had tried to listen to the people
around him in his daily life who uses ”telling” as their main purpose, until one day where he
heard one of them telling everyone how she had come home one day wanting to eat something
and she had asked her boyfriend to buy ketchup and then when she opened the fridge there were
no ketchup. And that was it. There was nothing more to it. The ketchup-story. If loneliness is
his only problem then sure, he could probably sit next to a life time of ketchup stories and try
to be content. But he isn’t. Life has to have a bigger meaning than that. The hard thing about
”telling” is that you either had to have a very strong personal interest in the speaker to get
something out of it or the speaker had to have a very interesting life to have something worth
telling. The ketchup-story had neither. This exact reason is also why Mr Brisby himself so rarely
makes us of ”telling” as his main purpose of communication. He lives quite a boring life and
very few people have a strong interest in him. Except for his wife. Whenever people asks those
telling-type of questions like ”How was your weekend?” he could only presume that he came off
as short, uninviting and boring. And he couldn’t help it. ”Nothing” is usually his days. Most of
his days consists of figuring things out - thinking about the small mysteries of everyday life or
trying to figure out things about human behavior while listening to the sounds of the apartment.
Like what he is doing right now. And he would love to have one of those reasoning
communications with people where everyone got to use things like ”opinions”, ”brain activity”
and ”genuine questions” but he could only conclude from his lack of popularity that people didn’t
really want to have conversations with each other as much as they wanted to speak to silence the

24
silence. But Mr Brisby never cared much for the strange art of ”Socialization”; to speak for the
sake of speaking. Socialization is a tricky thing to avoid, because to some degree it involves
questions and opinions and sometimes it involves a nuance of ”Telling” as well, but there is
nothing genuine in its end purpose. Here is my opinion about the weather, and a short story
about how the puddles soaked the end of my trousers and a brief reasoning how it showed all
the signs of an autumn moving into its final stage. It has all the textual signs of a conversation,
but without the content. It was pretty similar to two AI playing tennis against each other with
no score board. There were rackets, tennis balls, a net and ridiculously short white shorts - but
they only played to not let the tennis court go to waste. And five minutes after the game had
finished, it would be as if it never happened. There was nothing worth remembering from it.
Almost like it didn’t serve a purpose at all. (pun intended)

He unlocks his phone and sets it to no sound. Mr Brisby is perhaps the only person using his
phone in the opposite way as it is supposed to be used. It was no point in turning the sound off
during night time. It never woke him up because it rarely made any noise before 5 in the
afternoon, if it made any noise at all. But during day time turning the sound off made him
hopeful. It meant that someone could have sent something and the only way to know is to check.
Hope, perhaps in its most pathetic form. Hope pretty similar to a lottery ticket. No one ever wins,
yet people keep on playing. He used lottery tickets in the same opposite way, though.
“Good luck in gambling, bad luck in love” they say.
Every time he got a lottery ticket for his birthday he played to lose since he’d rather be loved
than rich.
He swipes his phone for some kind of entertainment.
Instagram is just Korean people eating… or pictures of insecure man-children doing anything
for attention.
and dead DJs.
and women trying their best to look successful.
Maybe he should see what Harry is up to…

The second foundational piece of hop in his tunnel was the fact that he’d started a routine to
listen to audiobooks before bed time. He likes it because when the day finally ends he’d also get
the delight of ending it in a positive manner. He had picked the tale of Harry Potter and he had
never regretted this decision even once. The truly magical thing about Harry Potter was not the
backstory of Voldemort, the side story of Dumbledore or even the wonders of Hogwarts - instead
it was the sensation of being part of a group. As pure and simple as that. Everytime Mr Brisby
closes his eyes around twelve o’clock he has friends. Two of them: Ron and Hermione. He
wondered sometimes if that aspect was the thing that separated fiction from non-fiction the most.
The idiotic idea that, even though a documentary occupied your mind while in it, you wouldn’t
feel any sense of belonging. Like in fiction. Friendship were maybe a part of some documentaries
somewhere, sure, but no one ever closed their eyes while David Attenborough explained The
Second World War because it meant they got to draw railroad maps with Adolf Hitler and Joseph
Goebbels. No one cared when Hitler died in the end, but people still try to e-mail Phoebe Buffey.
This is why the book in the middle of the Harry Potter series is one of the best ones. It is twice
as long as any of the other books but has half of the action in it. No mysteries. No secrets.

25
Nothing happens. It is just Harry Potter doing frustrating school stuff at Hogwarts with his
friends. For 30 hours. The brilliant thing about the book is that it is exactly the mundane feeling
of nothing that is the point. The hard thing about it though, from an author’s perspective, is the
relationship between the two different concepts of time: Time inside of the book (story time)
versus time outside of the book (discourse time). The mundane sensation where nothing happens
is quite boring to read about, but to some degree the reader has to experience it to understand
how Harry feels in the book. ”The year went by and nothing happened” would be an option but
it would be 8760 hours of frustration for Harry in his world but only 1 second of reading for the
reader. Would you really sense the frustration? The other way around wouldn’t really work either,
where it took 8760 hours to read something that had moved 1 second in the narrative world. Like
in those old soap operas where a full season’s running time still didn’t get the Lambert family
out of the living room couch where Uncle Tom with the shifty eyes still hadn’t revealed who
killed the farmer’s daughter. Real time, with an equal amount of story time as discourse time is
pretty hard to create though. For obvious reasons. Yet, anything can be done in the name of art,
Mr Brisby figures. But who would read it?

He opens Messenger and look for people online, but at this hour Internet is always as good as
dead. Like a Mad Max wasteland of tumbleweed rolling by in a brown depressing desert. He
writes “What’s up?” and press send, waits a few seconds to let it sink in on the other side but
gives up when nothing happens. The passive indifference is starting to take over. He can feel it
pouring in, as if he was a glass that someone was slowly filling up. Passive indifference isn’t
more optimistic than anxiety, but at least it has a harmonic sensation to it. He could perhaps
just stare at the ceiling for the rest of the day. And be content. And free. Listening to the wind
and the cars. Emptying his mind, letting it drift away and finding peace in the moment. Now is
now, I am somewhere else and who cares about tomorrow. Or anything. For what does it matter?
It doesn’t.
Anxiety is more of an active feeling since it does the opposite of emptying your mind. It traps the
mind in an absurd sensation of being in the moment. Where every minute matters. Making it
impossible to concentrate on anything else than the heavy burden of every second ticking away,
where you are so unbelievably in the present that you can’t grasp anything that is actually
happening around you.
They both have their pros and cons, he reasons while his right hand is turning the ring on his
left; feeling the cold familiar metal in between. He lets his thumb move up and down along the
surface, back and forth, scratching the incision they had decided upon before settling for a final
design with four diamonds.
Does he want to be stuck in a passive indifference?
Anxiety is worse, but the effect of it usually wears off as soon as you distract your mind off it
with something else. Indifference makes everything meaningless for days, sometimes a whole
week. Like a ghost gliding around observing the world from a cynical bubble that didn’t really
belong to reality, but was just indifferently drifting past people that didn’t really matter - where
everything along the way sparked no emotion and no interest. No emotion at all. Which was
harmonic in a room counting ceiling tiles, sure - but came with the risk that it would linger for
too long and ruin everything else.

26
How many times had he not found himself stuck somewhere just staring at something, and when
he afterwards tried to at least think about what he was thinking about during this time he
couldn’t even remember what. He could only assume he didn’t think about anything. A blanc
paper. The mind probably just shut down and went into hibernation. Like a screensaver.
The hard thing about the daily strategies he uses to endure his days between morning and
afternoon is that they had to be active ones. Or passively interesting. Visiting Harry Potter will
not work in the middle of the day, since it is a passive activity and passive activities were already
most of his days. The same thing goes for series. The passiveness of lying in bed letting the TV
do most of the thinking only worked short term, but when overdone it lost its edge to keep up
his interest. He sometimes preferred to clean the shower drainage, over a good movie, since it at
least made you take active decisions about detergent, tools, whether or not he would shower while
doing it, when to do it and the fact that it also created a satisfying end result. Listening to Harry
Potter, even though a positive thing, did not create a result in the end to be proud of.
He stays in bed.
Maybe for half an hour. Or more?
It feels like an hour. And he hopes it is.
He checks his phone to see if something new has happened, but it hasn’t.
The sun is bright outside, so he does what any sane man would have done in his situation: he
closes the blinds and turns on the electrical lights instead. There is something depressing about
having nothing do to in the 12 o’clock daylight that a cozy yellow electrical light will soften.
Maybe it rains outside, maybe it’s late in the evening. Who knows, the blinds or down. Whenever
he had that contrasting feeling between anxiety and passive indifference, between having nothing
do to and wanting to do everything in the world, he always wandered around the apartment like
Scrooge McDuck. Thinking. And if his life would have been a fictional novel, there would have
been a trench going in a circular motion from his bedroom and out into the kitchen. He closes
the blinds in the kitchen as well and the room immediately falls in to a comforting synthetic
brightness. A small intense red dot of light is screaming for his attention on the top of his piano
and he walks over to it and sits down. His fingers press down on the white keys and he instantly
turns the volume down. Not that it was that loud to begin with, but he just always got this weird
sensation that in a silent room every sound is multiplied by a thousand, and even though no
neighbor was at home and he could probably turn it up even higher instead of turning it down
– there was something strange about disturbing the silence. Almost as if his piano was disturbing
the peace. Like whenever you were in an empty church, it felt better to whisper than to raise
your voice. He and his piano whispered together; whispered something they both new and had
heard a million times too many. The song was trying to block something out of existence. Right
before the climbing crescendo he feels it – or something - building up, on the inside, so he stands
up, tries to shake it off and walks over to his big kitchen carpet right next to the piano. He
decides to use it as a practice area for last term’s dance course. As he usually does.
One forward, one on the spot and one back again.
The refrigerator hums.
What is this?
Is this life?
One forward, one to the side and turn around.
The sound is scraping inside of his head.

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Shouldn’t it be more to life than this?
He just honestly can’t understand life at all.
One forward, one on the spot and one back again.
In the middle of it he stops dead, sits down - right on the kitchen carpet - and he puts his hands
on his face. The tears wash over him, and he can’t stop them. Silently, he does it, to spare the
neighbors and spare the peace. The refrigerator hums. Somewhere outside a car is going by - and
he can’t take it anymore. He can’t take it. He checks his phone as a last resort to take his mind
off of life but it’s just nothing there. Someone flushes a toilet somewhere and the water wanders
through the pipes.
16 and a half.
He lays down, resting his back on the carpet surface and he takes a watery look at the kitchen
ceiling. The refrigerator keeps humming in the dead silent room and somewhere in the far
distant trucks are moving in both directions. He notices that the kitchen ceiling also has
plasterboards. But maybe he should save that for tomorrow? Two ceilings on one day. Ration,
ration, ration. He wipes his face and dries his hands on his shirt.
What has it been… 1,5 hours?
What about tomorrow, he thinks
And the day after, and the day after…
And in the middle of all this, he finally realizes it.
He finally gets it.
He laughs.
It’s so obvious.
He can’t believe he hadn’t realized it before.
Yes, of course.
He looks at his phone again,
16, and a half...
But the number doesn’t bother him as much as it did thirty seconds ago.
He stares, right into the nothingness of his kitchen.
With something almost close to a smile.
Almost as if he was finally at peace
It’s funny what a little meaning does, he thinks for himself
A little meaning, or maybe a sense of purpose.
It was time to take responsibility for life. Time for action. Time for change. To man up. To put
on a pair of pants for once and chose another direction. The end of an era.
He stands up, and Mr Brisby and the refrigerator tango in the 12 o’clock Monday light, a tango
salón in Villa Urquiza, and together they sing a lovely little duet conjured out of nothing –
conjured out of thin air. And in the final soltadas he lets go of the fridge door and makes it dance
on its own while they hum in chorus to the imaginary tunes of Mr. Alfredo de Angelis. The stew
had been waiting for him all morning long and he takes it. Without a care in the world. Fuck it!
For what was hop in the eyes of hope?
Nothing.
Nothing, but a mere substitute.
He microwaved the stew. A modern Jesus three minutes away from his supper. The last supper,
he thought. Salute the old and salutations to the new. A celebration to the things that had been,

28
and what was to come. A clear line between before and after. Today, and tomorrow. Jesus had 12
friends on his party, but Mr Brisby would settle for 3: Harry, Ron and Hermione. He flicked his
fork and the story continued from where it left off last time. Like magic. Together they laughed,
fooled professor Snape and ate Stew to their heart’s content. He would have loved to share this
moment with his wife, but her two light pair of feet never treaded the path of fiction and fantasy.
He wanted to read about the wonders of unicorns, and she wanted to learn about some third
world woman getting acid thrown in her face. They were different, sometimes, but he loved her
from the bottom of his heart nonetheless. He picked up his phone and left her a message:
I Love You

Mr Brisby knew that the only way to “man up” and take responsibility was to interpret it like a
child with Asperger. Men wore pants and got things done. It wasn’t the whole picture perhaps,
but it was a start he was willing to settle for. Ever since he got a bit older he’d seen signs of
himself aging, but no real signs of himself becoming a man. Every man past a certain point in
life got slammed with a bedtime routine that was a 45-minute-stretch of moisturizing lotions,
cortisone tubes, cotton soft toilet paper, hemorrhoid creme and hair regrowth formulas, he
thought. They were signs of a body maturing. But not signs of boy becoming a man, was it?
Maybe the hair thing, though. Men wore pants and no hair on the top back of their heads. He
had also been noticing hair on other parts of his body that seemed to be compensating for it.
Maybe it got bored all the way up there, looking at ceilings all day, and decided to wonder off
and relocate somewhere cozier.

He went to the bathroom to look at himself closely in the bathroom mirror above the sink.
Zooming in and out. All he had were these pair of super clumsy scissors for everything. He had
never liked it but had always been too lazy and too cheap to replace it with something better.
But men got things done, he thought. And men had receding hairlines and patches of hair on
new and weird places. A man was someone who accepted things as they were - even the little
things, like hair - and took action. He opened the bathroom mirror, scuffled away the cortisone
tube and grabbed the scissors. Not that people should throw away completely functional products,
but he did it anyway. Right into the little metal bin standing on the floor.
Symbolism.
Like a hairy fist raised against a cartoon star. He closed the small mirror door again and looked
at himself. He usually liked the way he looked. Or at least didn’t dislike it to any great measures.
And it was finally time to do something about some of it. So, he put on some pants, put on a
jacket and went outside. He took the road to the left leading away from the University and headed
in the direction of the bus stop. Take the bus to town and then walk back home, he thought.

On the bus ride he thought about his own appearance. And appearance in general. He had always
wondered how ugly people managed to fall in love with each other. The law of intellectualized
ugliness, he had named this theory of his since he had wondered about it before too. Because
appearances and attractive looks was in a way a Marxist thing - where norms, history, society
and symmetry played a vital role in why someone was considered beautiful and why someone
else wasn’t. Some would claim that attractiveness was something subjective - that everyone had

29
a choice to think whatever they liked - but at the same time it was only subjective within
boundaries not chosen by you; but by a pretty tight and narrow framework already set by society.
If someone asked us to draw a beautiful woman, most of us wouldn’t draw someone 2,3 meters
tall, with a mustache, one eye staring to the right and the other one to the left, no teeth and with
a handsome looking bald patch on the top back of her head. Surprisingly many would probably
draw pretty similar traits and details. The truly awful thing in this concept of attractiveness, Mr
Brisby thought, was that literally everyone was brought up to internalize these norms. This meant
that both attractive people and ugly people would find the same traits beautiful. Even the 2,3
meters tall woman, with a mustache, one eye staring to the right and the other one to the left,
no teeth and a handsome looking bald patch on the top back of her head, would find a young
Leonardo di Caprio beautiful. But Leonardo would most likely not find her beautiful in return.
From a bigger perspective this meant that beautiful people often got into relationships with other
beautiful people. And that ugly people most likely ended up in relationships with equally ugly
partners. For the beautiful couples this wasn’t a problem. Why? Well, since every time they
looked at each other every instinct and emotion in their body said ”I am attracted to you”. But
this posed a problem for the ugly couple. The man who tried to kiss the very tall woman with
one eye looking to the left and one to the right, making it past her mustache and light reflecting
in her bald patch, maybe got as far as to her toothless mouth before he had to intellectualize the
concept of attractiveness and re-program his whole adult brain every time he had to think: ”I am
attracted to you”. Because every instinct and emotion in him was brainwashed into wanting to
kiss Angelina Jolie. And Society didn’t brainwash ugly people to think any different than
beautiful people. So every time the ugly guy looked at his toothless wife he must have realized
somewhere along the way that: If I have to intellectualize her beauty and re-program my brain
every time to convince myself that she is in fact beautiful even though everything in me screams
that she isn’t- then chances are pretty big that she has to do the exact same thing when looking
at me.

That was why every time Mr Brisby had seen her two light pair of feet, heading towards his two
clumsy ones - and he saw her norm-like beauty - he himself must also be somewhat handsome.
There was always the chance that she had settled for something with a nice personality, but his
judgment about himself and compared to how she looked was proof enough for him to deem
himself an average looking guy.
An average looking man.
Starting tomorrow.

He went off the bus, walked up to the electronics store and settling with the cheapest nose
trimmer he could find. The trimmer in itself wasn’t important, rather, it was a token – not for
something new – but closure of something worth leaving behind.
Closure.
He had finally realized what he needed in life. He had so many strategies to start a first page
and creating something out of a blanc white surface but failed to realize that another way was to
have strategies to finish the old one; the page already scribbled on. Don’t read chapter two until
you’ve finished chapter one. And the end of chapter one needed a twist, a dramatic turn,
momentum: a boy leaving things behind - as man. He had tried so hard to be somewhere other

30
than where he was that he didn’t notice the most obvious thing screaming right in front of him.
He paid for the nose groomer and began his way back home again. In his direction, somewhere
in the distance, he could hear a crowd of people clapping; clapping like machine-guns over an
open field. He decided to take the small detour to it before heading home, and then go to bed.
Finally.
He lay awake for a while pondering about tomorrow while Harry and Hermione tried to sneak
past Mrs. Norris under the cloak of invisibility.
25 in total… 19 and 6 halves, he thought.
He wondered if Ron really enjoyed his fifteen minutes of fame, or if he would rather be under
the cloak?

Chapter III

M
r Brisby was a light packer, and it was something he took pride in. Four pair of
underwear and a toothbrush. All the essentials. He had glanced at his suitcase stuffed
in the back of his closet and thought that he would most definitely not be needing it.
Not for this one. He had bought a ticket in beforehand though, just to be safe. He
liked to have it on paper because it became more definite in some way. And a hell of a lot harder
to fail since it had the time of arrival on it. The time was important, he thought, plus he liked
to see the name of his hometown next to it, but more as some kind of symbolic gesture. The
vending machine tickets had those authentic details on them which he valued. The paper that
was slightly thicker than regular paper, the small squarish shape with rounded corners and an
old-fashioned font where the Governmentally owned train company wished the happy traveler a
pleasant trip. Have a pleasant trip, it said in large friendly letters. He would’ve liked to describe
it that way… but he wondered if that wouldn’t have been to push the boundaries of plagiarism a
little too far? He decided it wouldn’t. But just to be safe he thought he would avoid the number
”42”, since his story didn’t really involve numbers that much.

- 42, the drunk old man said while simultaneously laying in a pile of his own urine.

For Bob’s sake, he thought. That’s just typical. There’s practically no dialog at all in his story
and this alcoholic just blurred it out. Out of nowhere. What are the odds? He wondered what
would happen if one of those big super serious cybernetics corporations found out? If they sat
him in court in front of all the suits and lawyers of some megadodo publishing company until
he buckled under pressure and promised to take back every word. He wouldn’t last long. He
wouldn’t even stand a whelk’s chance in a supernova. But this was maybe jumping to conclusions
a little too fast, he thought. Don’t panic. Maybe they wouldn’t notice if he just kept on walking
like nothing had happened.
And he did.

31
He walked down the long and dull road that was the way to the train station. Hurrying along
the intersection crossing with the local kindergarten and trying his best not to look like a child
snatcher investigating for an upcoming heist. He walked the green mile from Shawshank Street
to Saxton where the forest mixed with the city and the picket fences kept Mr. Brooks on the
right side of life. Numbers, he thought. Yes, why not? Why wouldn’t his story have numbers?
He continued down the road and he wondered what his life would be if it was more like the
movies where only the good parts were visible to the outside viewers. I bit more interesting he
presumed. But that wasn’t real life was it? Real life was primarily a dull one hour walk to a
distant station somewhere. A road where the other people you passed were moving in the opposite
direction. Not opposite as in the concept of black and white - where if you walked the dull road,
the opposite way must be the fun road; where if ”this way” was a distant train station then ”that
way” must lead to the reuniting of the Beatles - but the opposite as in ”exactly the same”. The
opposite was in fact the very same road you just walked. Just the same shade of white viewed
from the opposite side. He didn’t mind walking though. It gave him time to figure things out
and put whatever he figured out in small mental boxes for later use. This though, he thought,
seemed a bit ironic when you thought about it.
He had heard somewhere that it took the effort of two idiots to make the biddings of one normal
person. That people often reasoned that the normal man was one whole, while the idiot was one
half in comparison. And where the effort of the two halves, put together, would create one whole.
But people got it all wrong, Mr Brisby thought. People looked at it the wrong way. Completely
wrong. The world had picked the problem up, turned it over and completely forgotten to take
their metaphorical glasses off. It wasn’t ”whole” metaphorically speaking, he thought, it was
literally speaking. This made no real difference to the normal whole man, but it made all the
difference in the world for the idiot. Idiots aren’t halves to a whole. Idiots are broken. And two
broken rarely made a whole. The only thing two broken accomplished, when put together, was
usually something twice as broken and two times as useless. He wondered if that was what people
meant when they sometimes joked he was an idiot. In a way he didn’t feel like an idiot, even
though he felt half. Therefor people must be wrong, he figured. But he didn’t feel whole so in
some way you could say he was broken. And he didn’t think another one just like him would fix
it. Therefor he must be right in his own idiotic logic.

From the slant uphill road, he could see all the way to the other side of town, where all the
kitchen lights sparkled like little stars from where he stood. He could see his car, standing on
its parking space outside the little red house with the hammock he installed last summer. He
imagined he could almost hear two light pair of feet dancing somewhere between the bedroom and
a glass of evening wine to music he’d never know. In reality it couldn’t be more than a few
hundred meters but from where he stood, it felt like a thousand miles. From where he stood,
she would might as well be a distant star. He wondered if the laws of physics didn’t apply when
the variable of ”love” were thrown into the mix of distance? Humanity was so eager to explain
everything mathematically that we always forgot to ask ourselves how many meters one kilometer
felt emotionally. Especially when you threw the concept of ”love” into the mix.
Walking time was nothing he minded. He actually liked it. It gave one time to pick up one’s
thoughts that had been put away for later reflecting. This was something he often did since he
liked to sort stuff out, but when he began he had the bad habit of doing it properly and often

32
”people” got in its way. He searched his mind for that nagging sensation of a subject wanting to
be sorted out. And it was something having to do with Numbers, he thought. Not like the ones
with emotions and meters, but something else, yet similar. It was something about something
he’d heard someone say. Or was it sung? Yes, sung. He remembered he thought about it because
he had it stuck in his head so long that he began to question if it made any real sense. ”One is
the loneliest number”, he thought. Yes, that’s it.
He looked at it.
Twisted it.
Shook it.
Held it up towards the sun and listened…
He turned it over.
Stomped on it and finally made up his mind.
He didn’t like it.
Didn’t like one bit!
Numbers can’t be lonely, he thought. Can they? Surely zero must be lonelier than one? He would
gladly take one friend over zero any day. Just as two could be lonelier than one? He’d rather
have one heart instead of a heart broken in two. And any one saying one heart was lonelier than
a heart in two pieces never had the unfortunate pleasure of owning one. Maybe numbers
shouldn't be mixed in with emotions at all, he continued. We somehow believed that numbers
were neutral and absolute, but they never were. And maybe that's why when you throw love into
an equation, it never adds up. That’s why she owned a ⅓ of his life story, she was ½ of who he
was, yet occupied 1 whole of his heart. 183,3% summed up. It made no sense at all, Mr Brisby
thought. But then again, sense and love never got together without at least one of them drinking
too much and calling the other one’s ankles fat. They went together like ketchup and jam. Like
two pieces of clockwork trying to make each other function even though one of them moved
clockwise and the other one had left a note saying it wouldn’t resume its counter clockwise
turning until the first one took back its comment about the ankles.

He thought for a while about the drunk man lying in a pile of his own urine. And how when it
all came down to it, those kinds of people seemed to be mostly men. Lonely drunk men. Lonely
drunk men that had nothing more to life than lying in a pool of their own urine. And how the
political debate seemed to miss that there was a pattern here. He had tried being one of those
feminists. Once upon a time. Fighting their fight for equality. For every drunk woman’s right to
lie in a pile of her own urine. If she wanted to. But he had failed. Not at first, though, he did
quite well in the beginning, but he failed somewhere along the way and he knew exactly why.
They were too blind to their own cause. Because Steve was the enemy and the root to all of the
world’s problems. Steve was a man, not a special man of any sort, but just a man. A normal
regular man. He put his pants on one leg at a time, just like any regular person. Steve had a job,
not a fancy one, but just a regular job. Some would call it a boring job, and so would Steve. He
didn’t quite like his job, and if he could he would’ve liked to switch. But it was too late for him
he always thought every time the alarm rang at 06.00 every week day until retirement, which
couldn’t come fast enough. His job was pretty monotonous, and he could feel the braindead
repetition starting to gnarl on the inside of his bones, but he did them anyway because someone
had to do it and at least he got paid a pretty generous amount of money every month. The job

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was boring and meaningless, but at least it paid well…. Somewhere around 16.00 Steve changed
into his private clothes and walked his usual route home while life seemed to move along in the
grey concrete buildings leading him straight to his own apartment. The apartment wasn’t half
bad. It was actually above average, if one was allowed to say so. When Steve got home he left his
phone in his jacket pocket, microwaved a food package from the store and stared right into the
empty air for 3 minutes until the microwave beeped and he would take it and eat it in front of
the television. Steve longed for his retirement but at the same time dreaded it. His job, even
though meaningless, was his most obvious contact with the outside world and with other human
beings. When he’d finished the soggy food package potatoes he went to the kitchen again to toss
the package in the trash but left the TV on since he liked the company. There were no dishes,
no cleaning to be done, no sheets to be changed and he had store bought food packages set for
the whole week. So, Steve parked himself in front of the TV again and waited for bedtime. He
thought about that funny thing Maria had said at work and hummed a small silent laugh that
was more on the inside than on the outside. Steve had kids, but they rarely contacted him. And
who could blame them? They had no relationship to Steve, cause someone had to bring food to
the tables. The TV often said that Steve ruined his kids. One day when he had come home he
had found an unfamiliar pair of underwear in his drawer and when he asked about it she took
the kids and lived happily ever after at a new address with another one’s name on the postbox.
But he got the apartment, a pretty decent pension and the TV. It was a new political landscape
brewing were Steve was the root to all the world’s problems. Steve and all his privileges. Steve
and all his power. His power as a man. Luckily for Steve, he was also white. If Steve would just
share some of his white male privileges to his former wife, equality would finally be reached the
TV often said. Half of his pension would be the only sane thing to give her from his throne on
top of his concrete mansion. And if Steve, and every man like him, couldn’t understand that they
sat on a position of power, in a pile of their own urine, and accept responsibility for the world,
then Steve and all of his sort were not a part of the solution: they were a part of the patriarchal
problem. Steve took his white male privileges and set the alarm for 06.00. He left the TV on
though, because he liked the company. The next day was pretty much the same for Steve. People
acted as they usually did, work went as supposed and the microwave spun for 3 minutes much
like yesterday and tomorrow. Steve left his phone in his jacket just as he always did, and as usual
he left the TV on while everything he had worked for his entire life had dinner somewhere else.

Power was a tricky word, Mr Brisby thought. Feminism walked into the same modern new public
management trap that everyone seemed to get stuck in now a days - where everything could be
measured and valued. How do you measure power? Did Steve’s fancy apartment make him more
powerful than his ex-wife living happily ever after? Maybe. How many points on a chart was
Steve granted because of his pension? It all sounded a bit one sided, Mr Brisby though. There
were no ”one” enemy and no ”one” solution the problems of equality. Men and women were both
victims and offenders at the same time, but the symptoms were different and couldn’t therefor
be measured with a tool that only measured material and political wealth. Because society was
nothing more than symptoms of power struggles and privileges being way off in both directions.
What is wealth without love and what is love without economical safety? Feminism was like a
child with autism trying to statistically make a bent curve straight by measuring something called
”power” which they read about in the first half of the book and then closed. Closed, like George

34
Lucas closed Episode 4 and pointed to the Dark side and - by a co-incident - found a neglecting
absent father to be the source of all evil. A father that later on in life spent his days in a pool of
his own urine and thanked his lucky stars his skin was an historical shade of power-white
whenever he borrowed the train station toilets to take some heroin. But a male with no
relationship, no friends, no partner and no means to get one would most probably get jealous of
the ones who seemed to have a lot of it: women. And a woman with no political power, no
material wealth and no means to be a part of a board of directors would probably get jealous of
the ones who seemed to have a lot of it: men. And when frustration builds for too long, people
will try to take whatever they seemed to be missing. By force. Men were sexually harassing and
forcing themselves on woman in frustration; women were using quotas to force their way into
high positions in frustration. And sure, quotas would still statistically make the bent autistic
curve straight for women, just as raping would make the line straighter for men - if ”power” was
something that could be statistically measured and valued. However, not only was this a pretty
short-term solution, but feminism didn’t even treat men and women equally in their quest for
short-term equality. That was why Steve with his apartment were the one oppressing his ex-wife,
and why the solution seemed to be for Steve to let her have the TV and his money. But why
would the sexual harassment stop just because women got more income? That would be like
asking why people still died of AIDS when everyone got their cancer-medicine. Mr Brisby tried
to ask the feminists why they hated AIDS-people, but they never seemed to get the analogy. And
he just didn’t have the energy to be around people that didn’t get analogies.

The world was a miserable place where no one listened to the other. Men didn’t understand
women and women didn’t understand men. And in a messed up place humor was the only thing
keeping people sane. Mr Brisby liked the idea of laughing in the face of misery. He did it himself,
often. To him, his own life was kind of like a play by Shakespeare where the heart wrenched
lover ran up the flight of marble stairs to find the love of her life, just a little too late, with poison
running down his lips, followed by a fart joke. The high tragedy and low comedy were something
inevitable in life. A funny man, he considered himself, but he, himself, would never stoop so low
as to prosper on cheap humor. Yet he respected the ones who mastered the noble art of contextless
comedy for the idiotic masses. But it wasn’t him. In the midst of his reasoning he failed to notice
his shoe laces being untied as his opposite foot stepped on it, making his feet unsynced, setting
his whole body out of balance and he kneeled down head first through a discarded Mc Donalds
bag laying on the ground. While it happened, his favorite jacket flew over his head and the back
of his pants ripped open like a fat lady’s underpants on the way down for the morning paper. Mr
Brisby got his head out of the bag and felt a sticky something attached to his face.

- Fuck, a passing man said, a little too eager for that pie eh? and Mr Brisby wiped away the
lemon pie that life accidentally threw in his face.

The train station lay just up ahead but Mr Brisby turned right. The picket fences switched to
plain grass for a while until they switched back to fences again, but this time guarding the
graveyard at the local church. The house of God, he thought. Mr Brisby stopped and twisted his
ring, feeling the cold familiar metal in between.

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Was there a meaning of life? Who knows. There were certainly suggestions circling around. Fairly
few of them could be applied outside of the person suggesting it though. People seemed to think
that life was something individual and that God had no plan for the bigger concept behind
human life itself, but instead left it to 7 billion people to come up with 7 billion answers. Mr
Brisby actually had an answer to the meaning of life. One suggestion that actually made sense to
7 billion people, all at once. But for short story posted on facebook, adding such a piece of gold
for free wouldn’t be possible, for it would economically ruin him. Just swish 20kr to 0704736489
and the missing last pages will be sent in the mail. Before he figured the meaning of life out he
had some other personal suggestions, for instance: The meaning of life is to experience every
feeling life had to offer, including the bad ones. This way of thinking made the sadness a hell
lot of easier. Sadness would then, still be something terrible, but also something that you had to
go through before checking out for the final time. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have truly lived. The
garden of Eden was only a paradise because the hedges blocked the dirt, the brown grass, the
industrial waste and the warmongers finding new reasons to stab each other. Mr Brisby didn’t
think that Adam and Eve where happier outside of paradise, but at least they died with the whole
picture. In retrospective, sadness wasn’t even such a bad thing. Emotions, even though they are
a hand full, are at least a proof of being alive. If anything, strong emotions are the equivalent of
being, perhaps, too alive. Too alive for a brief period of time. The feeling of losing a loved one
could be unbearable, because it reminds you that you are feeling something in the present. But
it also makes you take action. It makes you active. Anger, sadness, happiness all need outlets
because holding it inside is impossible, for sooner or later, you will burst. People didn’t know
this but strong feelings, even the hard ones, were a positive thing because it proves that you care;
that you have a purpose: that you need to take action to move forwards. The truly terrifying thing
is not the spectrum of emotions, it is the indifference of depression. You can’t cry your way out
of a depression. Or punch your way out of a depression. Depression will not burst out of you. It
will paralyze you; numb you; put you in the middle of a teeter-totter with two equally fat fat-kids
with short legs and no means to get off. And while you hang in limbo, waiting for either
happiness or sadness to start ordering a freakin’ diet coke for a change - nothing matters. Nothing
has a bigger meaning. There is no purpose. Happiness or sadness, life or death. Whatever. They
are all just one equally valued outcome and either one would be just as fine. Passive indifference.

All along the graves there were flowers neatly placed between gravestones and burned out candles.
Families were visiting their lost loved ones and children were impatiently waiting for the
mourning to finish. Mr Brisby wondered how many of them rested peacefully and how many
got snatched away way too early, how many that still waited to be united in heaven, and how
many that got no one waiting on the other side.
He turned his ring around again.

Love was a tricky thing to find. People searched their whole lives for it but only a handful got it.
That was probably why love as a theme got so unbelievably exploited in popular media. Even two
thousand years after Jesus died the best recipe for love that mankind had come up with was that
”love will come to those who aren’t looking for it”. As if we just tried for so long, gave up and
asked Gandalf for a road map. God led all those Jews out in the desert, what do He know. They’re
both bearded men with vague magical powers they never seem to make use of in a consequent

36
manner. Let’s just switch one for the other. If it worked for Frodo, then maybe it would work for
Love. But in a way that exact phrasing of love made sense, he thought. Just like when Arthur
Dent learned to fly. You just had to miss it to get it and find yourself already having it without
having known you even tried. And maybe that was why we called it ”falling” in love, because no
one falls on purpose. You just find yourself laying on the ground wondering if the sky had always
been this vertical. No one had ever ”gently kneeled their self” in love.
But love was portrait differently in popular media. Disney had this idea of love as something you
either got from an adventure with a true loves kiss or by waiting for it behind a dragon.
Hollywood, on the other hand, made love out to be something romantic happening between two
soul mates that always came through at the very end after a bumpy 2,5 hours where the guy just
waited for destiny to solve it while he decided to sit down and learn how to carve wooden furniture
in his father’s cabin out in the woods. TV-series were the most pessimistic though. Or perhaps
the most realistic? You either find love looking in your own apartment or don’t find it at all. Ross
got Rachel, Chandler got Monica. Joey died alone in the attic of Chandlers and Monica’s garage
in the suburbs. Marshall got Lily, Ted got Robin, and Barney ended up accidentally impregnating
one of his one-night-stands. Schmidt got Cece, Nick got Jess, and the producers moved Coach to
New York. This was probably why Cercei started fucking Jamie; incest or not, he’s right down
the hall, and she didn’t want to end up like Joey. Snatch him before someone else snatches him,
or she’d have to go for that dwarf further down the corridor.

That was the thing with modern fiction, he thought. Could one really learn anything about love
from romantic movies and drama series? People didn’t seem to know that Joey Tribbiani was as
much fiction as Dobby the House Elf. And that none of them could be held responsible for
anything. Ross didn’t end up impregnating Monica in the end, not because it would spoil the
illusion of the whole thing being completely made up, but because the writers took the show in
a different direction. But somehow fictional realism was the reason why people took dating advise
from a movie like Hitch where Will Smith, a black male, convinced a drop-dead gorgeous super
model to fall in love with a nervous loser fat guy. Yes. Seems realistic to me. But oh, is that a
Faun tap-dancing with a magical flute in a secret world hiding behind that cupboard door? Wait
a minute, this must be fiction…
and who was Mr Brisby for that matter? Did he even exist? Or was he just a biographical scheme
to use fiction as an excuse to put something a little too personal and private up for everyone to
see it? Who cares. It’s fiction.
Heil Hitler.
If George R.R. Martin could get away with a love story between two siblings with a disowned
prostitute-loving dwarf, then surely this would be okay? Mr Brisby thought.

But sooner or later, everything dies in the end, he thought. Even in fiction. No one seemed to
care what happened to The Loft and MacLarens Pub. They were mere stepping stones, mere
functions, a compositional motivation for the big prize at the end where Ted sat his kids down
and talked told them How He Met Their Mother and stopped at the place, juuuuuust right where
they all departed. No one ever tells the story about depressed uncle Joey living alone with the
old fussball table.
A table for two.

37
Or the one where he dragged it all the way down the stairs above Central Perk when everyone
else had better things to do. Or what uncle Barney did all those unlegendary nights when Ted
and Robin watched a movie and ate popcorn. Or every other night where there was no light at
the end of the tunnel. ‘Cause who cares? And when that dark cylinder shaped hole was a mere
dot of a light at the end of Joey’s tunnel, when the last Friend, the last connection to the outer
world and last crumb of human dignity - when the last little peep hole on a frosty window closed
up for good - there was nothing left to grip.

”Until death do us part” the sign above the church gate said.
He’d been thinking about that phrasing lately. And how it made no sense.
”Until death do us part”
Death?
Really?
He thought about why love was always connected to death somehow.
”Love you until the day I die”.
”Until the end of days”
He thought about how the second and third one was something loved ones said from the bottom
of their hearts, while the first one was something that God made you swear. In church. And how
they, in a way, didn’t fit together. God saw love as some sort of contract while mankind seemed
to have a more romantic idea about love and eternity.
He thought about how wrong God had gotten it. Why else would he make you swear it in that
exact way? ”Until death do us part”. As if one would automatically un-love the other just because
THEY died. ”Love you until the day YOU die”. How idiotic. And for that matter, why would one
swear love upon death when statistically life was by far the bigger reason why people lost love.
”Until death, or that guy at her office with a dental plan, do you part”.
Statistically, there were no other thing so terrible, so destructive and so unbelievably bad for love
than ”life”.

Except for Harry Potter. Maybe he was actually the only one who could relate to the concept of
love and death. But in reversed order. None of Harry’s loved ones seemed to die of old age. They
all sacrificed their life for love. It was almost as if they promised, not ”love until death do you
part”, but rather ”life until love do us part”. Lily… James... Sirius... Lupin... Professor Snape...
Even Voldemort, the man who searched his whole life for immortality - fueled by an
unquestionable talent for hate - finally lost his when his wand backfired because of Harry’s
enormous capacity for love.

But in real life, Mr Brisby just couldn’t make sense to why people still chose life, when life had
slain countless and countless of loved ones, while statistically death rarely did anyone part. In
real life, he’d never heard of anyone losing a loved one to death. There were very few widows out
there. Yet, people still clung on to an unloving life - an unloving loneliness - as if there were no
other option. He looked at his ticket and he looked at his watch. Everything seemed to be in
order. Right about now, he presumed.
On a bench, just on the other side of the rail road tracks was a bench. A bench occupied by two
alcoholics. While waiting, they looked at him and he looked back. Their shirts were tattered,

38
their trousers stained beyond measurement and their skin seemed to have been used both as a
container for keeping their organs on the inside, and sleeping bags. Friendship seemed to take
root anywhere it could, yet at the same time nowhere even though it should, he thought. A
wealthy white paraplegic geezer dragged around town by a criminal young black man. A dog
leaning its friendly paw on an hootful owl. Two alcoholics laughing on a bench while the first
one held the other ones hair during a cascade vomiting, and somewhere on bar in ”heaven”
Michael Jackson split a lobster with Ike Turner - and still he himself, with his whole adult life
to show for it, didn’t even get one single question about what he was doing last New Year’s Eve.
Not a single one.
It almost made him think that R. Kelly had something he didn’t.
He doubted that R. Kelly celebrated his New Year’s Eve alone… and he pees on people.
Mr Brisby rang in the new year with detective Jake Peralta.
It wasn’t half bad, but he just wished he could’ve had someone to talk to.
Or at least someone to pee on.

To Mr Brisby, loneliness was something that couldn’t be taught, rather it had to be experienced
to fully grasp. He didn’t blame people for trying though. He did it himself even though he knew
perfectly well that some things just couldn’t be read to be understood. He wouldn’t understand
hunger by reading about it. He couldn’t even understand it after starving himself for three days.
Only when you had placed yourself in a position with absolutely no access to anything eatable
and with no means of getting some, would you understand what hunger is. Hunger and starvation
aren’t the same. Even our language knew this. Why would otherwise be the point of having the
two separate words? There wouldn’t. So why was it that we thought we knew better? We who
invented the language. The same went for loneliness, he thought looking at the two drunks who
looked up from their vomiting when the train horn screamed in the near distance. Loneliness
isn’t a summer without your friend while she was trying to find herself with a bottle named
Jaeger and a bartender named Stavros. It’s not even coming home every night to an empty
apartment. Loneliness, Mr Brisby thought, is lying in bed, staring up at the same ceiling you’ve
been staring at every night since you can remember. And every hour of the day is just a waiting
game before night time finally comes to set you free. Until you wake up and realize the next day
is exactly the same. Hour after hour. 18 hours awake. Every day.
Day in.
Day out.
Staring at ceilings. Week in, week out.
He took three steps forward. Loneliness is the knowledge of you knowing that your number is
on at least eight phones, but no one ever seemed to feel the need to ever dial it. Two more steps.
And when you can’t count the tiny little freckles on the wooden ceiling no more, when you can’t
stand the 12’o clock sun, when you’d rather kill yourself than listening to another second of the
silent screaming of a humming refrigerator - that is when you truly understand what two light
pair of feet doesn’t sound like. He closed his eyes. They sound exactly like something you’d thought
you’d never hear again. Mr Brisby just couldn’t bear it. He couldn’t. Not after all this time. And
in a way he felt stupid. Because it was so obvious, and maybe a little too obvious to get noticed.
And it’s a funny thing, when you thought about it… One step…and he can’t believe that he
hadn’t realized it before:

39
The only bad thing about two light pair of feet is that you won’t hear when they walk away.

40
 THE MEANING OF LIFE:

The meaning of life is to fill it, as much as possible, with things driven by internal motivation.

The meaning of life is actually as logical as to listen to the phrasing, Mr Brisby thought.
The meaning of life is to have your meaning with your life.
That is why the meaning of life cannot be ”to have kids” or ”to play tennis” because it wouldn’t be
applicable to everyone.
However, Mr Brisby had thought of an idea that were applicable to everyone at once, everywhere no
matter where, everywhen no matter when in life.

Why do we even go out of bed in the morning? Mr Brisby would ask himself
And the obvious answer would be:
Because something outside of bed motivates you to.
# Let’s begin at the end: ”The meaning of life is to fill it, as much as possible, with things driven by
internal motivation”
To understand the word ”motivation” one have to understand the two different types:
internal motivation, and, external motivation

Internal motivation could be described as ”when the thing in itself is the reward for doing it”
External motivation could be described as ”when the thing in itself is not the reward for doing it,
but the reward lies outside of doing it”
These two types of motivation could be explained with something as simple as ”watching a video”.
If you chose to watch, for instance, Harry Potter because watching the movie Harry Potter is
rewarding in itself - this is internal motivation.
If you chose to watch, for instance, an instructional video on how to change a car battery because
your father said he’d buy you a car if you do, then the reward is not watching the video: the reward
is the car - this is external motivation.

Other examples of external motivation are school and (some) jobs:

In school, students rarely read chemistry because they love to understand why electrons circle around
a proton.
They do it because they need the chemistry grade to apply for higher education (or a job) later on.
The same thing could be said about some jobs. People rarely work for 40 years on an assembly line
producing car gearboxes because the task in itself is the reward. They do it because someone pays
them to. Money becomes the external motivator.

# Let’s look at what we mean with: ”The meaning of life is to fill it, as much as possible, with things
driven by internal motivation.”
What the hell is ”things”.
Things cannot only represent tasks (for instance your job, a movie, traveling, etc)
Why?
Because there are examples out there of people that had all the money in the world,
all the fame in the world, all the talent in the world, their life was a smorgasbord of tasks driven by
internal motivation.

41
They toured the world doing what they loved the most and everything they touched turned to gold -
and yet they still decided that life just wasn’t worth living. They took their own life.
Then ”things” can not be about tasks only. Which means that there is something else to life to give
it its meaning:
Relationships to other people (friendship, partnership, family, etc)
And just as with tasks, your relationships can be divided into internal motivation and external
motivation.
Isn’t it funny that we spend 8 hours a day with people at work we don’t even care about?
Or why some people would rather hang out with Gnorlab in World of Warcraft than their classmates?

If you are meeting someone and meeting that someone is the reward in itself - then you’re dealing
with internal motivation.
If you are meeting someone and meeting that someone isn’t rewarding in itself - then you’re probably
dealing with external motivation.
Is he rich? Does she give you discount on burgers? Do you like his apartment? Does she own a big
TV? Does he give amaaaaazing blowjobs? Why are you spending time with this person and would
you still spend time with him/her if you took away the outside reward?

This could be one reason to why so many people say ”having kids” is the meaning of life. Because
your kid is probably rewarding in itself to spend time with.

# Let’s look at: ”The meaning of life is to fill it, as much as possible, with things driven by internal
motivation.”

Who could walk through life without doing meaningless tasks?

It would be impossible. Even raising a child isn’t always rewarding in itself.
Changing diapers. Listening to your kids recital of Für Elise for the 89th time.
Or doing a meaningless job once in a while because the reward comes afterwards.
Life is hard, and life can change in an instance.
Every second of life cannot be meaningful.
Which is also a positive thing, right?
To truly appreciate the ones we love, we need the spend time with some morons, idiots and enemies.
To truly appreciate the things we love doing, we shouldn’t wear them out by over-doing them.

The meaning of life is to fill it, as much as possible, with things (tasks & relations) driven by internal
motivation.
When you wake up the final day at the end of your life.
And you ask yourself the question:
Was my life meaningful?
Are you going to remember all those hours at the assembly line and all time spent with business
people and co-workers?
Or are you going to remember the time when you built a 2 meter tall snow penis in front of the
kindergarten with your best friend?

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