RANCID COD-LIVER OIL

For some reason the honey that the morning sun poured over Indridi and Sigrid had begun to resemble syrup—not maple syrup, golden as amber, but cheap corn syrup: cloudy, cloying, and sticky. But that was better than what followed over the next few days. The syrup grew sour and the mornings, far from being sweet, resembled rancid cod-liver oil. Waking to the sound of bluebottles buzzing around them with their metallic sheen, blue-green and gross, and with a foul taste in their mouths, neither felt like kissing. They turned away from each other’s sweaty body odor mingled with the dried-fish genital stink of days-old sexual juices that they had not yet washed off. Their conversations became perfunctory and their silences were no longer harmonious, intimate and mutual but separate, so that when one of them broke the silence, the other was generally pensive and preoccupied and said:

“What?”

“Doesn’t matter,” came the refrain, although it often mattered a great deal, more than anything else in the world, a question of life and death, love and happiness.

“What?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

Even the “eat me, eat me” sounds from the Puffin Factory were accompanied by a strangely deep, harsh undertone, a “Grrryap! Grrryap!” that intensified every day until nothing but “Grrryap!” could be heard, filling the streets with fear and trembling.

At eight o’clock one morning there was a knock on Indridi and Sigrid’s door. Indridi went to open it. Or rather, he was over by the front door because Sigrid was taking a shit with the bathroom door open and he wanted to air out the apartment. Outside stood a smiling woman dressed in a red flight attendant uniform with the inLOVE logo on her breast. Indridi showed her into the sitting room. Sigrid slammed the bathroom door. When she came out she shot Indridi a poisonous look.

“Have I come at a bad moment?” asked the woman, trying to hide her disgust as the foul smell reached her. She looked about for a chair that wasn’t covered with piles of dirty laundry.

Sigrid didn’t answer but Indridi replied dully: “No, not at all.”

“I understand you’ve got a problem with being calculated,” said the woman, sitting on some crumpled shirts. “I may work at inLOVE but I’m human too, which makes me an impartial advisor. I thought perhaps you’d like to talk to someone you could trust.”

“It’s only me who’s been calculated,” said Sigrid. “Indridi hasn’t.”

“She’s not going,” said Indridi, looking determinedly at the woman. “We don’t need your help. She’s not going north.”

“Can I speak for myself, please?” asked Sigrid, looking at the woman and trying to smile. “I’m not going north.”

“Are you unhappy with the inLOVE service?”

“We’ve found each other,” said Indridi.

“But why were you on the list if you didn’t want to be calculated?” (Few people could face the bureaucracy involved in removing themselves from the inLOVE list, as de-registration resulted in all sorts of inconveniences and loss of privileges.)

The woman’s speech was a bit stilted. She was probably reading a text or parroting something that was being whispered in her ear. Valuable negotiators did not waste their time paying house calls. They eavesdropped from a distance and fed stooges like her with well-chosen phrases.

“Naturally we wanted scientific confirmation; we never dreamt we wouldn’t match up,” said Sigrid.

“You don’t have any children, do you?” asked the woman glancing around.

“We wanted to wait until we were calculated,” said Indridi.

The woman’s next line emerged rather stiffly: “You do realize what you’re doing?”

“Yes,” said Indridi.

“There are two people out there who will miss out on happiness because you didn’t want to be united with them.”

Silence.

“Do you want to miss out on happiness?”

“We are happy,” said Indridi.

“You mustn’t be selfish. You might think you’re happy but you’re only thinking of yourselves as halves, not as a whole.”

“A whole?”

“The whole is you and your scientifically selected other half. You must think of mankind as a whole. You know the inLOVE plan: when the whole world has been calculated and love flows across borders, races, and genders, then all wars and disputes will be history. Don’t you want a better world? Do you want to break the chain?”

“Of course not but . . .”

“It really ought to be illegal not to participate in inLOVE. Otherwise the world will continue to burn with misunderstanding, racial hatred, war, and selfishness. It only takes one unhappy man to send the whole thing up in flames.”

“But Sigrid is my other half; I’ve known that since the first time we set eyes on one another.”

“If she’s your other half, she won’t have eyes for anyone else, will she?”

“N . . . no,” said Indridi.

“So what are you afraid of? If she goes north she can talk to Møller, break it to him gently that he’s not her one and only, and come home again! Then you’ll have been proved right and that’ll be great!”

“Great, eh?” said Indridi. “Unbelievably great, yes. I don’t know of anyone who has gone north without getting hitched.”

“Indridi, dear, if they get hitched, then she’ll have found her perfect match! Or do you want to deprive Sigrid of happiness? Perhaps that’s it? Are you holding on to Sigrid because you yourself are still uncalculated?”

Indridi looked at Sigrid but she looked away.

“Of course it’s understandable if you don’t trust her,” said the woman.

“Don’t trust Sigrid?” said Indridi.

“Yes. Don’t you trust her?”

“Don’t you trust me?” asked Sigrid.

Indridi nodded. “Of course I do.”

“She wouldn’t be your perfect match if you didn’t. Would she?” asked the woman triumphantly.

“No.”

Indridi and Sigrid sat silent and thoughtful on the sofa. Sigrid looked at the clock and left for work without saying good-bye. She walked down the street without looking over her shoulder. She took an extra double shift. They didn’t meet until near midnight. They lay in the same bed without touching. Sigrid tossed and turned. Indridi stared at the ceiling and felt every fraction of a second pass like an hour. He lay awake for three thousand years and the moment he fell asleep, Sigrid silently dressed and crept out into the dawn. Half an hour later she boarded a bus headed direct for the deep valley where LOVESTAR twinkles behind a cloud.