Vox Humana Literary Journal

By Kári Tulinius

Markús sits down at a table opposite Geiri, who is wearing a white shirt tucked into synthetic black pants with a lot of zippers, and two-tone brown sneakers. Markús is wearing a plaid black and white shirt, black jeans and leather shoes of the same color. Geiri is holding a cup of tea, puts it down. A woman sits on a sofa in a corner at the far end of the room, white hoodie, blue flared skirt, is typing on a white laptop that has a silhouette of an apple on the back of the screen. A dark haired man with a moustache puts a glass with a light brown liquid on a counter and says:
“Café au lait.” Markús stands up, fetches the glass, says:
“Thanks,” sits back down. “What was I saying before I hung up my coat?”
“Nothing, I was offering my condolences.”
“Yes. Thanks again, and I offer my condolences to you too, you lost a friend.”
“Yeah.”
“I feel like I’ve had this conversation about a million times this week.”
“At least three times with me.”
“It’ll die out now. That will also be weird, wonder if I’ll miss it.”
“Hardly. How do you feel?”
“Rather shitty, to be honest.”
“Yeah, understand that. Not doing too well myself. It’s weird to come home and prepare for a media storm only to find that not a single soul cares.”
“The financial crash. There can only be one crisis at a time. Our society is being drawn and quartered and everybody is freaking out over it, no one has the time to worry about anything else.”
“Shit. That’s fucked up.”
“Yeah.” Markús has a sip of café au lait, says: “Can you tell me the story of the trip?”
“I don’t really know where to begin.”
“The beginning, yes?”
“Quite possibly, yeah. Oh, maybe if I had been interviewed I would’ve had practice in recounting the events, but, you know, wanted to give you space around the funeral.”
“Yeah, no, yeah but I, oh, I’ve been left too much alone.”
“Oh man, sorry.”
“No no, not your fault at all. To be fair it wasn’t anybody’s fault. I had and have lots of offers. Oh, I know I sound stupid but I want people to drag me along, which is an incredibly dumb attitude when people are competing to be the most considerate.” They both laugh, sip from their drinks.
“But yeah,” says Geiri. “Begin at the beginning, you say. I’ve always had a hard time telling stories, I always get stuck in the details, or to be exact, I don’t have a clear idea what’s important to the story and what isn’t. For example, when we toured the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, this Austrian came along, and he stank something terrible of deodorant. It was as if the guy had bathed in the stuff. When I think back to Bethlehem I remember this odor very strongly, I recall very little else from that day, but does it matter, should I mention it at all.”
“You don’t have to give me an exhaustive report.”
“I know,” Geiri sips tea, “but, just, I’ve thought so much about how I’m going to tell you and all it does is become more complex and convoluted in my head.” Markús drinks coffee, says:
“How was the plane ride?”
“It was just fine. I slept like a rock the whole way, I always sleep on planes, the noise affects me like a sleeping pill, just wake up to eat and go to the bathroom but otherwise I’m knocked out from takeoff to landing, yeah, and then we arrived at Ben Gurion, went through customs and immigration. I was interrogated by a guy and a girl, maybe a little bit younger than us, two three years, for about forty five minutes or so, and you know, I could swear that both of them were hitting on me.” Markús and Geiri both smile. “I almost asked the guy if he was on Facebook but under the circumstances I didn’t think it was smart.” Markús laughs. “Dóra was done when I got out. She had been interrogated by girls our age. It was apparently quite the friendly chat, one of them had been to Iceland for the Airwaves music festival. Chatted about Icelandic bands. We both thought it was kind of weird, had expected more craziness, like something out of a movie, or a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire vibe. You say you’re here to ride along in ambulances as a monitor. Is that your final answer? Can I poll the audience? There is no audience here, remember that. Is that your final answer?” They laugh. “Something severe like that. But that wasn’t what it was like at all. Then we went to the Augusta Victoria Church, or church compound I should say. It’s gigantic, there’s a hospital there run by the Lutheran World Federation. And that’s where people volunteering for Palestinian Medical Relief could stay. Oh, I don’t think I’m telling the story correctly, this is just something, you know, doesn’t matter. I could talk a long while about the ambulance rides I went on but, it was never anything very important, gallstones, an infected wound, broken bone, it wasn’t anything terribly interesting.”
“Was this in Jerusalem?”
“Yes, most of the time we were there. The only patient I have a very clear memory of was a guy in his fifties, some kind of hepatitis, who looked just like my neighbor when I was twelve years old and lived in Raufarhöfn. He was a fisherman who died a couple of years after we moved back to Reykjavík, fell overboard. But that Palestinian looked just like my old neighbor. I wondered if this was the same guy, whether he had faked his own death and moved to Jerusalem. I made up an entire movie in my head. These ridealongs were rather boring. But yeah, I imagined that this neighbor, I think he was named Atli, had managed to get onto another boat, maybe a Norwegian trawler, and wandered around Europe, maybe gone to Asia but then had a spiritual awakening and decided to go to Jerusalem and had lived there since. Jesus, why on Earth am I telling you this? What does it matter to you?”
“Don’t worry, you’re still in shock, same with me, I understand completely. Your thoughts are in chaos.”
“Thanks, yeah, I’m a complete mess. And you too.”
“Yup,” they both drink.
“But yeah, it was really strange to go there. Still, I got used to it very quickly, you only really understood how foreign this world is when you did something that was commonplace in Iceland. Like, one day I went on a shopping expedition with Dóra looking for black hair color for blondes, this was an insane hassle. Even though we had a man with us from the Lutheran World Federation who knew the language it always took forever to explain what it was that we were looking for. In the end she just had it done in a hair salon. Markús finishes his glass of café au lait. While I sat and waited for her I paged through one of those magazines that are full of photos of different hairstyles and it was exactly like the ones you find back here. All of a sudden the foreignness crashed over me, the heat, smells, sounds, the language, a pile of details, like how the dogs there looked completely different from dogs in Iceland. It suddenly became utterly overwhelming. It was an extremely powerful experience. More so than, for example, when Dóra and I were in a square and all of a sudden a tank arrived. Or not all of a sudden because, Jesus Christ, these are incredibly loud thingamajigs. I’ve never heard anything as noisy anywhere. It was like how you imagine a rocket taking off. Everyone disappeared from the square instantly, except us. Remained there alone. Didn’t know what to do. And then this giant vehicle arrives, this heap of metal, into the square, stops moving right where we are, points its gun at us, is still for a moment. There was absolute silence. No birdsong. No traffic din. No dogs barking. Not so much as a squeak from a single human being. But then the tank kept going and we never even considered that we had been in mortal danger, typical Icelanders abroad. Nothing ever happens to us.”
“Sometimes I think the entire Icelandic nation is damaged, that something about the country disables certain centers in the brain, but then I think, no, we aren’t that special, nothing unique about us.”
“You may have a point. Yeah, I’m not so certain that Spaniards or Australians or Japanese people would’ve behaved any differently, you always feel so special abroad because you’re almost always the first Icelander that a foreigner has ever met, there are so goddamn few of us. Actually, after I had stared down into the barrel of the cannon the paranoia which is ever present there started to gnaw at me.”
“Were you in Jerusalem for a long time?”
“Yeah, ten days, then we went wandering around the West Bank, first to Ramallah then Bethlehem, to Hebron, and from there to Nablus, mostly we looked at old churches, after all we were there partly for the good graces of the Lutheran World Federation. I had mentioned the Austrian in the Church of the Nativity, inside it there were mosaics that Empress Theodora of Byzantium had commissioned and they had bullet holes in them. It was very strange and somehow brought home how much damage had been done there, well, in maybe a silly kind of way. The misery didn’t affect you in the slightest but then we welled up over mosaics with holes in them, and also, all you remember are some minor details, for example, we ate once in a place called Osama’s Pizza.” They laugh.
“For real?”
“Yeah, we laughed so hard when we saw the sign that people started staring at us.”
“Were the pizzas edible?”
“Yeah and then some. Damn good. Dóra grabbed a pile of napkins with the logo to give people here. They remained behind. You remember something like that insanely well but then there are whole days which are only a blur. I remember what the staff looks like, the other customers, the pizzas and how they tasted, the aroma in there. On the other hand, see, one of our main tasks was to bring pharmaceutical deliveries to old people that the aid organization supplied with medicine. I don’t remember what a single person who received drugs looked like. It only took a minute each time but I would think that I’d remember at least one face but no, the brain is bloated with trash. Almost literally. I could describe garbage piles to you with detailed accuracy, cardboard and glass shards flowing out of dumpsters that lie on their side. But not really, there are so many things there you don’t know the name for. At first all that trash was shocking but then you stopped noticing it, finally you got so used to it that only stuff that was peculiar caught your attention, like piles that were just one thing. Bottles of the same soda, single color carpet rags, stacks of the same pamphlet, like a factory shipment had fallen off a truck and putrefied as it fell. The West Bank is all like that, like someone ordered a nation state off the internet but it fell out of the mailbag and lies rusting up against a fence. Then the people who are born there, the people who had the bad luck of being born there, try to do their best while everything falls apart around them. Entropy grows and spreads, pushes itself into people’s homes, jobs, life, school, everywhere. What’s most ridiculous and disheartening about Palestine is how incredibly, terrifyingly, stupidly normal everything is, just, you know, people being people.”
“What about the oppression?”
“Maybe I had expected too much but still, yeah, since the tank I was constantly afraid of getting mowed down or blown to bits, even when I was in the ambulance I felt like a target. I was wound tight the whole time. When we weren’t working we drank beer, that helped tremendously, especially because you drank so much coffee which was brewed strong and sickly sweet. It’s funny, when I got back to London from Ben Gurion airport I bought black coffee and got a shock, achingly bitter. I had to empty four packets of sugar into it before I could drink it. Then you’re drinking it black just a few days later. But yeah, of course it’s oppression. Everybody I met told me a story of almost dying. Were visiting their aunt when a missile hit her house. Sat in a café when a gunfight broke out and a bullet tore a hole in the sleeve of a brand new shirt bought in Tel Aviv. Stuck in traffic on their way back onto the West Bank from work. Almost at the border when an explosion tore apart a jeep and lit the car right in front of them on fire. Soldiers stormed a house and beat the crap out of everyone because somebody had lied that there was a bomb factory in the basement. Dóra and I were at a checkpoint going into Jenin, she had her passport in the wrong compartment so searching for it took her forever. During the while I started chatting with one of the soldiers. He had grown up on a kibbutz and we talked about that and Iceland. He quizzed me a lot about agriculture here which I don’t really know much about besides the fact that it’s declining. I didn’t expect to talk about population flight from the Icelandic countryside while I was in Palestine, it was very surreal somehow. The soldier said that in Israel people were moving to cities from rural areas too, though he said that he thought that communal farms held onto people better than single owner farms. And then, suddenly, I was telling an Israeli soldier about the history of the farming cooperatives movement in Iceland, a completely ridiculous turn of events. The next day we found out that half an hour after we left a terrorist blew himself to pieces and took three soldiers with him. I suppose the soldier I talked to was one of the dead. And just think, if we had had been going through half an hour later we probably would’ve died too. Or, yeah, you know. Both of us. Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Markús turns his glass of café au lait in circles with his fingertips and drinks what remains.
“In Jenin we met a married Palestinian couple our age who hadn’t left the city for five years, they were too afraid of the Israeli soldiers or of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They told us countless stories of people who had died or been permanently maimed, usually completely coincidentally. Went to this particular food market instead of the one they went to normally. Had one more cup of tea while visiting a friend. Walked home from the theater instead of taking a cab. Stopped for a moment to watch children playing football. Sometimes I felt like everybody in Palestine was almost dead, the Palestinians, Israelis, foreigners, each and every human being a hair’s breadth from being dead. Jesus, what am I saying to you?”
“Don’t worry.”
“But then sometimes I felt like everybody there was incredibly alive, superalive. When we were in Ramallah we saw a kid get bitten by a stray dog, bit him on the hand and ripped his shirt, and we washed and bandaged the injury. This was our sole heroic deed.” Geiri laughs. “Then he led us to his home. Judging by how we were received you’d think we’d saved the boy from being torn to little pieces by a pack of wolves. His mom hugged us, or I assume it was his mother, it could’ve been an aunt or an older sister. There wasn’t much English between them. We were given food, chicken pine nuts and onion on some sort of flatbread. Unbelievably good. While in Palestine Dóra and I lived on shawarma so getting something different and more authentic was wonderful. After that we shared a hookah with two men, I think it was the father and older brother of the boy or his cousin maybe. Then we had to leave. We were in our glory. We made a connection with actual real people. They were so full of life, like seeing a landscape on a sunny day after too many dreary winter mornings. This was the only time I felt like I had entered into Palestinian reality, that I grabbed hold of the society. Other than that I was always terribly conscious of being a foreigner, like a scuba diver in a shark cage, protected from danger but near it.”
“Hey,” said Markús. “I’m going to get more coffee. Do you want anything?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” Markús goes up to the counter. Geiri puts his left elbow on the table and leans his head into the hand, the fingers push the curls away from the forehead. he fidgets with his teacup, finishes the tea, his gaze wanders from the tabletop to the woman who sits on the sofa in the corner, she pushes the two halves of her laptop up against each other and pulls a book out of a green cotton bag, The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño, opens it, puts a crocheted bookmark on the table, it has red and yellow stripes. Outside the window the sky is darkening, clouds moving. A male teenager in a gray hooded coat, black jeans and frayed heavy boots, comes up the stairs into the café. Geiri leans back and stares at the ceiling, scratches the back of his head, lets his hands drop, Markús puts a cup on the table.
“Hot chocolate,” says Geiri and straightens himself in his chair.
“Yeah, I’m plenty caffeinated.”
“Regarding the last night, that is, when Dóra died.”
“Yes,” says Markús. “I was wondering when you’d get around to it.”
“You know, it’s hard.”
“Yes,” Markús takes a sip, stares at the tabletop.
“While we were in Jerusalem we got to know this Finnish chick, Mari, who was traveling around Palestine for reasons I was never certain of. At first I thought she was a journalist but I think she was just a tourist. One night we had a few beers with her and a couple of Swiss dudes who were volunteering for the Lutheran World Federation. Dóra spoke more to Mari and I with the two guys. They were both from Zurich, fresh out of divinity school but had little interest in being ministers. They had been in a band together. It had fallen apart. One of the dudes, a bass player, wanted to study music further, preferably jazz, but doubted that he had what it takes. The other one was struggling with writing a novel. The way he described it to me it sounded just awful. a group of medieval monks from all over Europe on their way to the Holy Land are stuck in a mountain pass because of a landslide, there they stay and talk about God.”
“And what”
“And nothing. That’s the whole story, I asked him if they had to eat their companions to survive. He got huffy, the bass player insisted that the story was brilliant and that his friend was a genius, a mix of Umberto Eco and Berholt Brecht. They were rather boring but that’s how we met Mari who we then ran across again in Nablus. I’m not entirely sure but she either studied journalism in Helsinki or Marxist cultural criticism in Prague, maybe both. I don’t think so though. She’d spent time in the Czech Republic either way. She’d recently had a horrific breakup. Her ex is a drummer in an environmental black metal band. Summers he’d mostly spend in a rundown shack he constructed himself in a forest clearing on land his family owns. When he’d move back to Helsinki in the fall he’d be a complete mess, flew into fits of rage for little or no reason, criticized Mari constantly in bizarre ways. Not making her own clothes, being complicit in the rape of Mother Nature because she used too much toilet paper. Total nutjob. They had been a couple for five, six years and she had left him three times before. For all I know they’re back together again, don’t think so though, she seemed thoroughly tired of him. She interviewed people the whole time she was there, one of her backpack compartments was full of dictaphone tapes. She had interviewed the Swiss duo and wanted to record us as well but we didn’t want to. She gave very fuzzy answers when we asked her what she’d do with it all. I think she just pretended to be a journalist so that she would have some sort of role there, although, maybe she was on a research trip of sorts but hadn’t figured out what she could do with the information she gathered, didn’t have any particular consumer in mind. The night we first met my communications with her were very limited, a Swiss brick wall separated us. Running into her in Nablus was funny, you don’t expect to bump into people when you’re abroad, especially not while wandering about. It’s easy to forget what a small part of the world Palestine is, it’s almost like being in Iceland, always the same crowd. She had gotten involved with a Korean. Kim Hiemann.”
“Wait, wasn’t she traveling with the Swiss guys?”
“Yes, but she had traveled with a bunch of different people, for safety purposes, but she and the Korean had gotten together. But he wanted us to call him Baumer, like the character in The Royal Tenenbaums. He said it was hopeless to be Korean and named Kim, said it was like being a German named Adolf. One of the Swiss dudes, the budding novelist, was named Adolf. I thought a great deal about why he didn’t want to bear the same name as the totalitarian father and son, actually I quizzed him a little about his eccentricity and he said he only called himself Baumer abroad, he didn’t like the way nonspeakers of Korean said Hiemann and in Korea nobody associated him with the dictators, the name Kim being common as dirt, but since he didn’t know when he would return to Korea his name was Baumer now, he had studied at an American college and had not interest in going back to the peninsula, as he always referred to his homeland, his parents were both deceased and he had inherited a small fortune.”
“Jesus, how old was he?”
“Twenty two. He told me late in the night that he had lost his mom young and his father two years ago. His maternal grandparents had founded a juice factory that his dad had managed till his death, even though technically the company belonged to Baumer and his sister. They got rid of it as quickly as they could. He said he was using the opportunity to travel to everywhere in the world he’d always wanted to see. And use his sad past to get into bed with Western blondes.” They laugh.
“I hope the Finnish girl beat him good.”
“Yeah, she hit him upside the head. Baumer enjoyed making questionable comments, at least when he was drunk. Mari was rather similar, always saying something ridiculous. If you asked her something she was just as likely to reply with nonsense as to answer honestly. When I tried to get out of her why she was in Palestine she replied, flies, her hatred for them was so strong that she roamed the world chasing the fiercest swarms and that the most disgusting ones south of the Bosporus could be found in Palestine.”
“Whoa, heavy handed political metaphor.”
“Dóra asked about it but she just laughed, most of the time she didn’t mean anything by what she said, that’s how she seemed to me anyway. Dóra and Mari were really happy to meet again, they had gotten along famously in Jerusalem. I got to know her much better in Nablus, the four of us talked, not like when the Swiss duo was there, they barely spoke with Mari and not Dóra either.”
“What did you talk about?”
“We began by doing what foreigners do when the locals are nowhere near, we complained about them. Then we felt kind of bad about it and we talked about the oppression. Then we made fun of ourselves and the other tourists, we got our cynicism rocks off. I don’t think we meant a single word we said. I think that the only thing that annoyed all of us was the fucking music. The Arabian pop wasn’t too bad but the endfuckingless eighties crap, the very worst of the decade, it was driving us crazy. It wasn’t the cool fun stuff but awfulness like Lionel Richie and Hall and Oates. If I never hear that song, I can’t go for that oh oh oh ah ah no can do, ever again, my life will be much improved. Or that damn Lionel Richie song, oh, the one that has the video with the blind girl who makes a bust of him which doesn’t look like him at all.”
“She was blind after all.” They laugh.
“True.”
“And the song is Hello Is It Me You’re Looking For.”
“That’s right.”
“I’m somewhat ashamed to know this.” They laugh.
“For the love of fuck, now I have that song stuck in my head.”
“It’s not me who brought it up.” Markús drinks hot chocolate.
“Yup, no one else to blame but myself, but this music blared inside every store, taxi, restaurant, everywhere. But mostly we talked about what we had in common, movies we liked for instance. Baumer, as his nickname suggests, is a film buff, he wants to learn cinematography when he’s bored of traveling. But yeah, Baumer had acquired some moonshine somewhere, it was quite alright, better than the homebrew we drank in high school, fairly rough stuff though, Baumer said it tasted like soju, the Korean national liquor, their black death, we drank it in coke.”
“Were you the only ones there?”
“Yes, it was some sort of hostel, the only other guest was a Frenchman in his forties who went to sleep just about when we arrived. He didn’t stir all night even though we were quite loud at times. As the night wore on irritation flared up between Dóra and Mari, as we drank more Mari got cruder and Dóra more upset.”
“What about the Korean?”
“He talked the most of us in the beginning but less and less as the hours passed. I stayed about the same, I think, Dóra got angry when Mari started to joke about dead kids. No, that’s not quite right. Baumer started, told a few jokes, you know, how do you bathe ten dead babies in one tub? Meat grinder.” Markús laughs. “How do you get a hundred dead babies onto the back of a truck? Pitchfork.”
“Okay, I get it.”
“But then Mari took it much further, grabbed a pillow and treated it like an infant, spoke in baby talk and rocked it, but would then pretend to strangle it. Started the baby talk up again, apologized to the pillow, promised to never hurt it again, but then hit the pillow against the corner of the table, started babbling again. It went on like that for a good while. Baumer and I thought it was hilarious and I was under the impression that Dóra found it funny too but then she whispered to me in Icelandic that I shouldn’t laugh at this. The other two asked us what we were plotting. I said the first thing that came to mind, that she had asked where the toilet was. She wasn’t too happy about that but I pointed it out to her and she went. This at least stopped the pillow game.”
“Hold on. I need to go to the bathroom.”
“Yeah, okay.” Markús gets up from the table and walks to a door that’s opposite the counter. He walks in, shuts the door behind himself and locks it, puts the seat down, sits without pulling his pants down. He breathes deeply. Muscles in his face vibrate, clench. He grabs some toilet paper, wads it together, leans forward, grips his head, and breathes out. Breathes deeply, stands up, lifts the seat, throws the paper into the bowl, unzips, pees, zips up, washes his face, dries himself, throws the paper towel into the bowl, flushes, opens, exits, walks back to the table sits, says:
“Yes, and what more irritated Dóra.” Geiri’s gaze slides across Markús’ face. Geiri says:
“She seemed fine after she got back I didn’t notice anything anyway. She was rather quiet. We all kept on drinking and talking. I mentioned the Challenger disaster, Baumer was born that same year and Mari started talking how astronaut meat flakes had spread all over the planet and that everyone had feasted on them, started to lick the air and say, mmmm, human flesh, tastes like shawarma. Dóra didn’t think it was funny at all, told Mari to quit, that it disgusted her and that she was disgusting and me and Baumer too. We told her to stop, it was only a joke. Mari just got more into it and started to name body parts she was tasting. Dóra asked me to stop it, to get them to stop. I said no, it’s just a joke, its fine, she rushed out, went up the stairs onto the roof. We kept going, at first a bit quieter but then we forgot. After a little while Dóra came back down, asked what were laughing at.” Geiri’s eyes water. “She asked, and yes, like. We didn’t say anything. She asked if we were laughing at rapes, the holocaust, murdering parents. We stayed silent. I said, yeah, yeah, all of it, and she started shouting at me in Icelandic, accused me of all kinds of things, vileness, cowardice, having been mean.” Tears fall down Geiri’s cheeks. “Then she ran into the hallway. I thought she had gone to her room, that she was asleep. Then later, called and called. Made phone calls, wasn’t found. Then, then, she was found. Had gone out, sorry, sorry. I should’ve gone with her the first time. I’m so sorry, so sorry, I, so sorry.” Markús grips Geiri’s hand, says:
“You didn’t know.”
“I know.”
“You didn’t know.” Markús starts crying too. The woman on the sofa in the corner puts on headphones and looks away. The man behind the counter stares at the two weeping men. A young man who sits facing away from them is listening to an iPod.
“I know, but, if I,” they embrace. “I thought, I thought I could tell the whole story without crying if I were in public. I thought. When I contacted Jerusalem. She had been wearing a Lutheran World Federation shirt. They were called. She was more than a kilometer away. Away. And she had crawled into a car to sleep. If I had just left with her. A tank, minor skirmish, barely newsworthy, checking to see, the car in its way, sorry sorry, drove over it, her, I am so sorry.” Geiri sobs, Markús says:
“Wait.” Releases Geiri, goes into the restroom and gets a bundle of paper towels takes it back to the table and gives one to Geiri, who wipes his face, blows his nose, says”
“Do you forgive me?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.” They start crying again.
“My oh my, we are total freaks, people must think we’re thoroughly lame.”
“Yeah,” Geiri laughs. “This must be the most embarrassing moment of my life, basically since I came out of the closet at the family dinner table and my mom and dad’s response was to talk about potatoes.”
“For real?”
“Yeah, they didn’t breathe a word about it until a couple of hours later. We watched an entire game of football before they said anything. It was crazy uncomfortable.”
“That’s hilarious.” Markús drinks hot chocolate. Geiri stares out the window, says:
“I’ve thought about those last hours, after Dóra left, she has stormed off in anger, stomping around the streets, meaning to circle the block, losing her bearings, scared, tired, just about falling asleep up against a wall, sees the car, crawls in, dies.”
“Well,” says Markús and pours the rest of the hot chocolate into his mouth. “Shouldn’t we go? I can’t bear hanging around a café any longer.”
“Yup.” I was thinking of suggesting we see a movie.
“Do you know what’s in the Regnbogi theater?”
“No. Surely some good flick. If not we can wander over to the Háskólabíó theater. Oh, to be honest I don’t care what it is, just want to be inside a movie theater and escape reality for a tiny bit.”
“Okay.” They stand up, push the chairs up to the table, take their coats off the hooks and put them on. Markús’ is black leather. Geiri’s is dark blue, wool, with large wooden buttons.