Present Tense Machine: A Novel

By Gunnhild Øyehaug and Kari Dickson

“An ingenious pocket universe.” —Caitlin Horrocks, The New York Times Book Review
"Gunnhild Øyehaug is a magician of the highest rank."—Catherine Lacey

On an ordinary day in Bergen, Norway, in the late 1990s, Anna is reading in the garden while her two-year-old daughter, Laura, plays on her tricycle. Then, in one startling moment, Anna misreads a word, an alternate universe opens up, and Laura disappears. Twenty years or so later, life has gone on as if nothing happened, but in each of the women’s lives, something is not quite right.

Both Anna and Laura continue to exist, but they are invisible to each other and forgotten in each other’s worlds. Both are writers and amateur pianists. They are married; Anna had two more children after Laura disappeared, and Laura is expecting a child of her own. They worry about their families, their jobs, the climate—and whether this reality is all there is.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jan 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9780374722289

Gunnhild Øyehaug

Gunnhild Øyehaug is an award-winning Norwegian poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her story collection Knots was published by FSG in 2017, followed in 2018 by Wait, Blink, which was adapted into the acclaimed film Women in Oversized Men’s Shirts, and in 2022 by Present Tense Machine. Øyehaug lives in Bergen, where she teaches creative writing.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

The Emergency Stairs

There are student flats above and below them, and another across the landing. The students quite often party together, from Thursday to Sunday. For example, Laura might be sitting reading a book early on a Thursday evening when she’ll hear the clinking of bottles out in the cold concrete stairwell, hushed voices, and steady footsteps on their way up, and then she’ll know that in about four hours’ time she will hear loud, shrieking voices bouncing off the walls as the party makes its way back down, and later, if she’s unlucky, she’ll hear the even louder noises of a nachspiel at three in the morning. And if she’s extra unlucky, the noise will be from the flat above, where they are dancing and jumping around to Let’s Dance on the wooden floor that is Laura’s ceiling, under which Laura is lying on her side with her knees pulled up, eyes open, with her duvet between her thighs under her big belly, and an orange earplug bursting out of the ear that is turned to the ceiling.

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It’s not possible to live here with a baby, Laura and Karl Peter have decided, after just such a night. It makes them sad, because they like their flat on the third floor of the old brick building in Møhlenpris, the Manhattan of Bergen, as Karl Peter likes to call it, even though he’s never been to New York. They like the feeling of being alive that they get from living there, they like the idea of a melting pot, all layers of society living on top of each other, the football pitch that’s missing one corner because there wasn’t room, the Ping-Pong table on the pavement in Konsul Børs’ Gate, the light that’s caught between the buildings on the straight streets as the sun goes down. But the drug addicts are a problem; Laura and Karl Peter don’t like the dealer who lives on the other side of the street, on the ground floor, and they don’t like the needles outside the main door, nor are they particularly fond of the structure of the so-called chimney houses, of which there are so many in Møhlenpris, one of which they live in themselves: they’re brick on the outside and wood on the inside, which means that the houses act like chimney pipes in the event of a fire and draw the flames up through the floors with great speed and efficiency, and for precisely that reason they’re not happy that they have a smoke detector that goes off all the time and that the landlord has done nothing to fix it. All in all, it’s time to move.

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Laura and Karl Peter are twenty-four and twenty-eight, respectively, and 164 and 198 centimeters tall. One is dark, the other is fair. At the time of writing, Laura is standing in the roughly one-square-meter hallway between the kitchen, the bathroom, and the bedroom. When I say at the time of writing, I’m of course referring to myself, not Laura. She’s not writing, I am. It might perhaps have been more correct to write at the time of writing, I have wet feet, because it’s true, I have wet feet, there’s a big hole in my boots. And I can’t get new ones. But anyway. Back to Laura. She opens her mouth and prepares for what in linguistic terms is sometimes called externalization, in other words, language as speech. Karl Peter, come here, she shouts. She can hear that he’s sitting at the piano in the living room, tinkling away, which is why she shouts so loudly. Laura has just picked off all the masking tape that was stuck around the doorframe to the emergency stairs, it’s the first time that Laura’s seen the emergency stairs, and what she sees shocks her. How could they have lived here, in this fire hazard of a house, for three years, without knowing? The thought rips through Laura, causing her heart to beat faster than she feels is good for the baby.

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Recently, Laura has had the disconcerting feeling that everything is double. She suspects it has something to do with the fact that she’s pregnant and that it’s firing up some sensory center or other in her brain that she doesn’t know the name of, but that she remembers only too well—that’s to say, she doesn’t remember the sensory center itself, but its effect—from some overwhelming anxiety attacks in her intense young woman stage from ages nineteen to twenty-one, when she would suddenly get the feeling that things were not what they seemed, that the wallpaper was coming toward her, or that the ringing wasn’t in her ears, but in the air outside her head, etc. Yesterday on the street she saw a man walking a dog, which she later found out was a Neapolitan mastiff, the kind of mastiff that has a face that is so wrinkled and pendulous that it looks like someone has made a mistake, because what on earth is the purpose of all that excess facial skin, what evolutionary advantage could that dog face have over other dog faces, where the skin lies tight over facial bones, why did the cheeks need to fall like curtain folds, as though the whole face were a crushed, molten drop, an enormous horror-movie mask, she could just picture the dog trying to eat, its entire face mushed against the dog food, then it turned and glared at her with its aggressive dog eyes deep in all that sagging flesh, and she felt as though the mastiff were quivering, as if he had doubled right there in front of her.

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But right now Laura stands there holding in her hand all the masking tape that’s been taped around the door to the emergency stairs. Her face is an ordinary human face. The masking tape is ordinary masking tape, stuck neatly and smoothly over the gap between the door and the doorframe, just as it had been when they moved in, and Karl Peter wanted to leave it as it was. To stop any drafts from getting in. They live in a flat full of drafts. There’s also a draft from the large gap under the balcony door, at the opposite end of the flat. A cold draft circulates through the flat at floor level, like a chilling, repetitive thought, a depressing sigh, a sign, Laura has sometimes thought, a warning from the flat of what it’s really like to live in a building owned by a man who does whatever he can to avoid ensuring his tenants’ safety, who can’t fix the fire alarm even when he’s getting complaints every week, who tricks and fiddles with the electricity supply, who doesn’t replace the windows when they’re cracked, who does nothing about gaps and drafts. If they take off the tape, they’ll have to buy more. Then he, Karl Peter, will have to do the taping. And that would be so boring. Laura, on the other hand, likes to be prepared. She likes to visualize things, in the way that downhill skiers visualize the course before they push off. In the event of a fire, she wants to know the terrain. When Karl Peter has been out on tour with his band, Laura has gone to sleep with a flashlight and a knife under the bed, with this in mind: In case of a fire, or break-in, the emergency stairs are the way out, that’s how she’ll escape. She first has to turn the key in the door out to the emergency stairs, then she’ll have to just push it with all her might, because she won’t have time to pull off all the tape. Last year, she went to bed like this one hundred and fifty-six times; this year, so far, it’s been only seventy-seven. False security often feels remarkably like real security, and it has worked for Laura, she has managed to sleep, even though the knowledge that she lives in a firetrap has bothered her almost every day since they moved in, and even though she knows that the hand holding the knife (if she manages to grab it from under the bed where it’s lying, should an intruder suddenly appear in the bedroom) will wither into trembling, prickling fear, and be incapable of stabbing, and even though she knows that she will probably die of smoke inhalation before she’s managed to get to the emergency stairs—and that if she doesn’t die, she might panic and not be able to turn the key in the lock, if she’s even able to find the key, which is so easy to see in broad daylight, when you’re not enveloped in thick smoke.

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The tinkling doesn’t stop. Hello, Karl Peter! Laura shouts again as she stands there with the door to the emergency stairs wide open. Karl Peter saunters through the kitchen, reaches out to grab a jar of jam, apple jam made by Bård, Laura’s father. Bård loves making jam, and this one has a hint of vanilla. Karl Peter picks up a spoon, takes a large mouthful, and comes out into the small hallway where Laura is standing with the masking tape in her hands. Take a look at that, Laura says, and nods at the stairs. Jeez, Karl Peter says, have you taken off the tape? I thought it would be impossible. It’s become part of the place, Karl Peter says, astounded, you can’t just remove its identity. Karl Peter is just so Karl Peter as he stands there, eating apple jam. He’s got bare feet. He smells of cigarettes. He’s tall, he has a way of being tall that makes him seem like a cardboard cutout, or a statue moving around the room, somewhat reluctantly, as if being a tall statue is heavy work. When he’s up onstage with his guitar, it’s as though the beams from the spotlights are illuminating a Norse god in a T-shirt and jeans. He always looks fierce onstage, and offstage, gentle. Or laid-back. Karl Peter takes hold of the doorframe and leans past her to look down the stairs. Jeez, they’re wooden, Karl Peter says. That’s a bit of a paradox, isn’t it? The main stairs are concrete, and the emergency stairs are wooden? Mm, says Laura. We have been living in a chimney for three years without knowing that the emergency stairs are made of wood, Laura says. What does that tell you about us? Well, Karl Peter says, as he eats another spoonful of apple jam, that we’re trusting? That we’re optimistic? That we don’t worry without reason? These are all criticisms of Laura. Laura is pessimistic. Laura often sees the downside first. Laura worries before she needs to. Laura is often a deep and dark amalgam of unnecessary anguish. Have we tested the smoke detectors recently? Laura asks. No, I’m pretty sure we haven’t, Karl Peter says. Didn’t we change them last year? Don’t worry about it. But we will have to buy more masking tape now! He throws up his hands. Fuck, crisis! He laughs, pulls her to him with the arm that’s not holding the apple jam. He kisses her. Don’t stress, he says. It probably just means that we’re living in parallel universes. You don’t say! Laura says. The stairs are parallels, Karl Peter says. One is concrete, one is wooden, see? Karl Peter says, and kisses her neck. Laura, in addition to feeling that everything is double, has been feeling aroused more often recently. It has almost become a problem, not for Karl Peter, but for Laura, it’s too much, it makes her unfocused. That’s because the vagina is swollen during pregnancy, the midwife said when Laura, blushing, asked, and the

Reviews for Present Tense Machine

[gwendydd · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a delightfully odd book. It is about a woman who is reading a book, and misreads a word, thus inventing a new word that has never existed before. The sudden existence of this new word spawns a new alternate reality where she does not have a daughter. In the new daughterless reality, she feels like there is something missing, but she doesn't know what. In that other world, her daughter continues to exist, but lives a completely different life without her mother. The book alternates between the two realities, where both women grapple with the feeling that there is something wrong while negotiating relationships with mothers, daughters, and spouses.The narrator intrudes often, in very delightful ways, sometimes even daring to knock on the doors of her characters.As much as the book explores loss, it is also full of joy. It's a quirky and interesting read.