WAVE ON A SCREEN

“Would you wither away if I died?” asked Helga, after they’d measured the pair of divers that time on Melrakkasletta. Their boys, then ten years old, were paddling in the bay a short way off. Orvar was too scientifically minded to leave it at that. In the evening he went out to the patrol jeep and aimed the monitor at Helga who was sitting outside the tent reading a book in the light summer dusk. He climbed out of the car and sat down beside her so the machine could measure their waves.

He had a knot in his stomach when he opened the jeep door to see the results. She had soft, rounded waves. He had sharp, peaked waves, like the jaws of a savage wolf, he thought. No. Like the peaks of Hraundrangi. Exactly like Hraundrangi. They each had their own individual wave, their own individual landscape. He went to bed without turning off the monitor. Helga came across the screen the following morning.

“Orvar!” she called. “Orvar!”

“What?”

“Look at the screen! Did you hear anything last night?” She gazed at the screen, entranced. “It’s as if a falcon and a ptarmigan had flown through the sensor!” She glanced around. “What a shame to miss a falcon.”

“Would you wither away if I died?” Helga asked, seven years later, but before he could answer a black BMW honked outside.

Their daughter woke up crying in her room. Helga hurried to her. When she came back, LoveStar had left for Los Angeles. LoveDeath was nearly home free. All that remained was the technical side, which others would sort out. Trial launches, earthmoving and the excavation of tunnels, the installation of launchpads on the mountaintops around the property in Oxnadalur. Then there were the power plants. Endless power plants, hydrogen production, packing, body transportation, and the battle against reactionary forces. Last but not least there was the mood. The Mood Division would smooth image over everything and distract attention from potential problems.

LoveDeath was breaking out of its shell and from now on the idea would live an independent life. LoveDeath would take up residence in Ivanov’s head. He would be managing director of LoveDeath. For the next weeks and months LoveDeath would compel him to employ thousands of men and women, and all these people would get the same symptoms. Technicians’ heads would be filled with technical solutions, transporters’ with logistical ideas, businessmen’s with business plans, and every branch manager in the world would do their utmost to ensure that every single millionaire in their market area would be launched with LoveDeath. They would all work as one toward expanding the empire, cutting costs, and improving service. LoveStar himself needn’t worry about a thing. All he had to do was sit back and watch the outcome.

All over the world people received phone calls from Ivanov and became infected with LoveDeath, but LoveStar was cured that night as he lay alone in his Los Angeles hotel room. As if a fog had cleared in his head. It was late at night when he came home and got into bed beside his sleeping wife and baby. At that very moment their sons were dancing the night away at a disco on the Croatian island of Murter in the Adriatic, before going on to screw cheap whores and suck cubes of golden Chicago honey.

For one moment LoveStar’s mind was pure and clear as the sky, but in the sky there was a bird.

“Apply your mind to the birds,” Helga had told him.

Their own chick was asleep. He stroked her head before going down to the basement. The monitor that he had used to measure the divers lay among a jumble of wings, otoliths, and old computers. He drew a line in the dust with his forefinger. His nerves were going, his home was breaking up, Helga was wasting away, and the boys were on the fast track to ruin. He needed to get his bearings, rest his mind, take a holiday, and recover from LoveDeath. But there was something that drew him to this monitor: the monitor harbored an idea. It hadn’t been designed to measure human waves, yet it seemed to do so anyway. He put the monitor under his arm and took a taxi to see Yamaguchi, head of the Bird and Butterfly Division. Yamaguchi came to the door. She was stunning, with a smooth cap of silky-black hair, white skin, slanting eyes, and fiery red lips. They had met in Paris, in mutual pursuit of Arctic terns. She had spent long periods at the terns’ overwintering grounds in southern Africa. She was tern-like herself: petite, delicate, yet more determined than anyone else he knew.

“Is everything okay?” asked Yamaguchi. She was standing in the doorway in her dressing gown.

LoveStar stood hunched over, the monitor in his arms.

“I think I’ve found love,” he said with tears in his eyes.

Helga never knew that Orvar had love on the brain while LoveDeath was coming into being and everyone was wondering at the developments in the Oxnadalur theme park: the extravagance, glamor, madness, lunacy. While the media spotlight was directed at the liberation of mankind’s hands, the inexorable technological advances, the Statue of Liberty, the Puffin Factory, the films, and cordless Russian rocket engineers who trashed apartments wherever they were lodged, the Bird and Butterfly Division had something extraordinary up its sleeve. Its emissaries set up sensors on the busiest streets of big cities. They recorded major events, protests, and mass meetings all over the world, measured the waves emitted by as many people as they could; they collected the results and processed them in the research wings in the bowels of Oxnadalur. Gradually patterns began to emerge, real results. They invited people north and witnessed incredible scenes.

“How do you feel? Is it love?” Yamaguchi asked the first people to be brought together after being measured with the same wave signal.

“It’s love,” they replied. “I’ve found my other half.”

“Could you describe the feeling?” she asked after they’d been together a week.

“It’s more than sex. Words can’t describe the feeling.”

“How do you feel?” LoveStar asked people after they’d lived in a derelict farmhouse for a whole year.

“Better. We get on better and better together.”

By then everything had long ago broken down in the control group. The control couples had been made to live together under the understanding that they had been measured with the same wave—but in fact they were opposites. Healthy, beautiful, lively people began to bite, beat, and hit one another after only half a day in isolation.

“How do you feel?” a psychologist asked a woman from the control group.

“I feel sick just thinking about him. I sweat and shake, I get headaches, stomachaches . . .”

“Would you like to meet him again?”

The woman grabbed the psychologist and stared crazily into his eyes.

“SAVE ME! DON’T SEND ME BACK TO HIM! THIS CAN’T BE LOVE!”

Doctors came and measured the woman in every conceivable way. “Physical rejection,” they noted.

Those couples who genuinely had the same wave almost merged into one being.

“Well, now she’s gone and you’ll never see her again. How do you feel?” Yamaguchi asked a man who’d spent a year in a derelict farmhouse with his perfect match.

He didn’t answer. He lay in a daze like a heroin addict. “Véronique!” he moaned, “Véronique!”

“There’s hardly any pulse,” said the assistant doctor. “I’m concerned about him. He’s got a serious physical dependence on her. You must reunite them.”

Everything is material. Everything is physical. Somewhere in the body was a primitive sense that could pick up birdwaves as the eye senses light, the ear senses sound, and the tongue senses taste. A sense that processed the waves and auras emitted by other people. The brain had no words for the feeling.

LoveStar never got to tell Helga about the inLOVE plan, which was not made public until seventeen years after LoveDeath. She was dead by the time the LoveDeath division of the LoveStar theme park was opened, two years after that telephone conversation with Ivanov. Queen Elizabeth II and the Jaggers were not the first people to fall to earth with LoveDeath. That honor went to Helga Thorlaksdottir, a thirty-seven-year-old mother of three and wife of Orvar Arnason of LoveStar for sixteen years. No one knew this except two Russian engineers and LoveStar himself, who sat in his Hummer on a black sand dune in the middle of the Odadahraun desert, watching her burn up in the atmosphere. No one noticed that the coffin that was laid in the earth in the old graveyard in Reykjavik was full of sand. The boys were too brain-fried to carry it.

It was twenty-nine years since Helga had died, and LoveStar’s hands had begun to wither away. In the cold darkness outside the gleaming body of the plane, the Million Star Belt could be seen like a glittering nebula. Around the moon a silver halo formed as its rays were reflected by the costumes, which flashed in turn as they rolled and revolved in the vacuum. LoveStar held a seed in his withering hand. He had only one hour and fifteen minutes left to live.