Sigrid realizes, with a stab in her stomach, right in the middle of the sexual tension that’s so suddenly arisen, that the connection between the picture of Bush and one’s “inner game” corresponds exactly to the connection she’d experienced that morning between Sofia Coppola, so fluid and fragile, and the aesthetics of Lost in Translation, likewise fluid and fragile, and thus the incredible possiblity that what one can see on the inside can in fact be expressed physically on the outside. She opens her mouth and feels nervous, all of a sudden, but before she’s managed to say a word, Kåre says: that thing about the inner game is actually pretty spot-on, even though I like to make fun of it. It’s true not only for golf but for everything. For example, the book’s advice on how best to hit the ball out of a hazard is to imagine it first. Imagine the sound of the ball leaving the sand. There shouldn’t be much sand in the sound, it should be clean, quiet, pofffff, Kåre says, with just a hint of sand. When one has imagined the sound and knows what one is aiming for, one’s aim is better. Just as he’s about to say what this means in terms of real life, what it illustrates or teaches us, and in particular, the fictitious Bush Junior character and his views on international politics, just as he’s about to say this, which also happens to be exactly when Sigrid has finally straightened up her body and mustered the courage to tell Kåre her thoughts on Sofia Coppola and Coppola’s inner and outer expression, they hear an almighty bang outside the window and both turn around. A black car has driven into a blue car outside the multistory parking garage opposite the café where they’re sitting. The blue car was turning out of the garage, the black car was turning into the street where the blue car was coming out. The blue car had obviously misjudged the turn and now has its nose in the black car to prove it. The doors open and a couple of men leap out. Hands punch the air. Fingers point at the damage to the cars. Oops, says Sigrid. How bizarre. And as Kåre watches the men gesticulate about the collision, he thinks this is crash number two, that he’s witnessed two crashes since he met Sigrid, that means something, and he is overcome with the grim thought that what it might mean is that he’s lost the inner game, he was supposed to control himself, that is what it means; he was supposed to hear the sound of him and Wanda forever, he was supposed to hear the sound of Wanda getting out of bed before him and going to the kitchen to read the paper and make coffee, he should have heard that sound every morning and held on to it, and not be sitting in a café looking into Sigrid’s brown eyes, which have green rings around their irises, and because he’s now lost in the thought that he’s lost the inner game, he doesn’t hear Sigrid say enthusiastically that what they’re seeing now is the kind of situation that Daniil Kharms, a Russian author she adores, uses to portray the absurdity of existence, like watching someone gesticulate in a telephone booth! An image, she adds, that Albert Camus also used in The Myth of Sisyphus, where it says … um, something about … um, what was it again … Sigrid tries to remember how it goes; no, she can’t remember.
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But, she says, not many people know that it was actually Daniil Kharms who wrote about it first!