The Happiest People in the World Read online

  “What do I have to do?” she asked.

  “You have to act like I’m dead,” he said.

  She nodded. “I can do that,” she said.

  After that, neither Jens nor Ilsa seemed to know what to say. Jens fought off the urge to tell her again that everything would be just fine, even though he really did believe that was true. He also fought off the urge to tell her he was scared, although that was true, too. Because what do you say when a marriage ends like this? Jens pictured a cartoon in which a man and a woman, the woman standing in front of a burning house and the man in front of an open grave, handed oversize wedding rings back to each other, the woman saying, “Well, that was a mistake.”

  And then Jens turned, walked to the agents’ car, got into the backseat, and closed the door. The car drove off. There were two agents in the front seat; Jens was by himself in the back. After a moment he said, “That was horrible. But I do think I got through it fairly well.” But the agents didn’t respond. Possibly they didn’t hear Jens, because he was crying so hard as he spoke, or because they were busy figuring out where they were going to take him next, where he was going to run.

  3

  But where?” Tarik asked Søren. It was eight o’clock, the morning after the fires. They had just read about the cartoonist in the newspaper. Not the newspaper whose offices Tarik had burned down, of course; a different newspaper, a daily out of Aalborg. Murderers, the Aalborg newspaper had said. Religious extremists. Terrorists. “Run,” Søren said. Neither of them thought of themselves as terrorists or religious extremists. And strictly speaking, it was Søren, not Tarik, who was the murderer. Because Søren was the one who’d burned down the cartoonist’s house. “Should we run?” Søren had said.

  “But where?” Tarik wanted to know. They were out in Grenen, reading the paper, sitting next to the dunes that were next to the parking lot. Søren and Tarik were eighteen years old. Their jobs were to answer any questions people might have about the machines that dispensed the parking passes you were to put on your dashboard before you went out to the point to watch the waves. But nobody ever had any questions, not even the really old people who didn’t know how anything worked. The machines were pretty much self-explanatory. It was a crummy job, no less crummy for being so easy. Basically the two of them just slouched around the parking lot all day like bored teenagers everywhere. Sometimes, when the parking lot was especially empty, they got on their cykler and played følg leder. Sometimes they read the newspapers people left behind on benches. That was where they’d seen Jens Baedrup’s cartoon: in someone’s abandoned copy of the Skagen Optimist. Yet another cartoon featuring Muhammad with a bomb in his turban! It was unbelievable, they agreed. They couldn’t believe it. They felt insulted by the absolute stupidity of this guy. The terrible, lame newspaper that’d printed the cartoons, too. Did they really think they were saying something new and profound about the other cartoons, etc.? Or were they just hateful people stirring up more trouble? Either way, they were stupid. Please stop drawing and printing these stupid cartoons, Søren and Tarik wanted to say, or would have, if these cartoonists and newspapers weren’t too stupid to listen, and if Søren and Tarik weren’t too angry. Angry, it was clear exactly what they were going to do, what other people did in other similar situations: they would burn down the newspaper building, the cartoonist’s house. But they’d never meant to kill anyone. That was clear to them, even though their anger hadn’t made it clear to them that when burning down occupied buildings, killing someone was always a possibility. But the newspaper out of Aalborg had made this obvious enough. Now, they were trying to figure out what to do about it.

  “Turkey?” Søren said. He and Tarik had been born in Denmark, but all four of their parents had been born in Turkey. Søren and Tarik knew nothing about the place. They’d have to ask their parents for help. Their parents would have to ask them why in the world they wanted to go to Turkey. Tarik would have to tell his parents he burned down the newspaper building. That was bad enough. But Søren would have to tell his father (his mother had died a few years earlier), Dad, I killed that cartoonist. “I can’t do it,” he thought and also said.

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Tarik agreed. He crumpled up the newspaper, was about to throw it into the dune, then changed his mind and tossed it into the nearby trash can. Soon the cars began to pull into the parking lot. Tarik stood up to take his helpful position near the parking-ticket dispensing machine. But Søren sat on the ground, eye level with some dune grass.

  “I killed that man,” Søren said.

  “Stand up,” Tarik said. Søren did that. “And keep it to yourself.” And for four years that was what he managed to do.

  PART THREE

  4

  Two years later, as Jens Baedrup was in one city (it was Berlin) to which he’d already run preparing to run to somewhere else, Jens asked the agent guarding him where she would run if she were him. The agent was standing at the window, looking at the street, her right hand on her holstered gun, her left hand holding the radio to her ear. With her free ear she must have been listening for the sound of Jens’s suitcase shutting and latching, and when she didn’t hear it, she turned around and said, “Hurry.” Long before this, Jens had been handed off by the Danish Security and Intelligence Service to a series of agents who spoke to Jens and each other in an accent that could have meant they were Americans or could have meant that they’d learned to speak English from watching American TV. As for Jens, his English was both unaccented and perfect, as it was, of course, required to be by the Danish educational system.

  He shut his suitcase and asked her, “Where are we going now?”

  The agent looked back out the window and sighed in a way that seemed intended to let Jens know how peeved she was that he and his little cartoon had put her into a position where she was forced to actually do her incredibly boring and dangerous job. “You know about as much as I do,” she said. This, of course, was completely untrue. As with everyone who’d kept him safe, she knew exactly why he had to leave and where he was going next. As with every one of his safe-keepers, she never told him what she knew, including why he had to keep running if everyone thought that he was already dead. (“Credible threat,” was all she would say when he asked. “There’s a credible threat.”) As with every one of his safe-keepers, this made Jens totally dependent on her, and it also made him fall in love with her a little bit, and it also made him want to go somewhere remote where he would never see her again.

  “If you were me, and you wanted to go somewhere so remote that no one would ever find you,” Jens asked her, “where would you run?”

  Without hesitation she said, “Broomeville.”

  “Where?” he said.

  “Exactly,” she said.

  5

  Matty was in his office, even though it was Friday night. Outside, it was dark, dark; inside, the overhead lights were flickering like there were small animals up there, chewing on something important, or just running back and forth, enjoying their Friday night, having a good time messing around with the long fluorescent tubes.

  “I’m not even supposed to be thinking about you,” he said into his cell phone, “let alone talking to you.”

  “So don’t talk,” she said. “Just listen.”

  So Matty did that. She talked for a long time, long enough for him to understand that after he’d ended their affair seven years earlier, she’d been so angry at him and at Broomeville and at the fucking world that she’d decided to go to work for the CIA, long enough for him to understand that—in her capacity as a CIA agent and his capacity as an American citizen—she wanted him to do her a favor, long enough for him to get up out of his chair, walk out of his office, out of the building, out into the parking lot. He kept turning in circles while he listened to her talk. Way off to the west was the big dark nothing of the lake; to the east was the big dark nothing of the mountains; a half mile to the north was the town, the little square that was actually more like a trape
zoid, the gazebo, the monument, the diner, the bar, the other bar, his house, which—before they died—had been his parents’ house, the river that eventually ran into the lake; right in front of him, to the south, was the Broomeville (New York) Junior-Senior High School. But from where was she calling? In what direction was she?

  Anyway, when she was done talking, Matty said, “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “You sound different,” she said. “Are you outside now or something?”

  “The CIA?” he said.

  “I bet you’re standing in the parking lot.”

  “How does someone just end up in the CIA?”

  “The old Broomeville Junior-Senior High parking lot.”

  “The sky is full of stars here,” he said.

  “The sky is full of stars here, too,” she said.

  “Are you outside?”

  “No, but I’m just guessing.”

  “What exactly did this guy do anyway?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Why not?”

  She didn’t say anything right away. The only thing he could hear was breathing, and he wondered, Why is it that when someone breathes in your ear on the phone it’s either sexy or sinister, but when someone does it in person it’s mostly just annoying? “Because I don’t want to,” she finally said.

  “Fair enough,” Matty said, and immediately he wished he hadn’t. She had once accused him of saying that—“fair enough”—way too often and in response to things that weren’t fair enough at all, and then they’d gotten into a fight about it, his gist being, did she have to be such a bitch, and her gist being, she wouldn’t have to be such a bitch if he didn’t say “fair enough” all the time.

  “There are no jobs,” he said.

  “Then fire someone. There has to be at least one person there who deserves to be fired.”

  “There’s no one,” he said. But too late: he was already thinking of someone. “I’m not giving your buddy a job,” he said anyway.

  “Any old job will do,” she said. “And he’s not my buddy.”

  “No,” Matty said.

  “Let me just make two points.”

  “He’s an internationally wanted criminal.”

  “He’s not a criminal, Matthew,” she said, “unless being clueless is a crime.”

  “But he is internationally wanted,” Matty said. “People are trying to assassinate him. And you want me to give him a job in a school. A school full of children.”

  “But that’s one of my points,” she said. “People are trying to assassinate him here. People get assassinated here all the time. But no one ever gets assassinated in America.”

  “What about Martin Luther King Junior?” he said. “What about Abraham Lincoln?”

  “Well, there are obviously exceptions,” she admitted.

  “What about the Kennedys?”

  “Fair enough,” she said, and then they both laughed.

  “I have missed you,” Matty said.

  “That’s my other point,” she said.

  6

  After Matty got off the phone, he thought about the last time he’d seen her, a Saturday, early morning, seven years earlier. They had been sitting in her car, which was parked outside Doc’s Diner, in downtown Broomeville.

  “You said you were going to tell Ellen about us,” she’d said.

  “I did,” he’d said.

  “And that you were going to leave her,” she’d said.

  “I can’t,” he’d said.

  “Do you love me?”

  “I really do.”

  “Then why can’t you leave her?”

  He’d thought of all his reasons why: his guilt, his fear, his son, his teachers, his students, his job, his town, his wife, his life. “I just can’t,” he’d said.

  “You’re so gutless,” she’d said.

  “I’m what?”

  “Gutless,” she’d said. “Without guts.”

  “Fair enough,” he’d said.

  “Wow,” she’d said. “I really want to hurt you right now.” And Matty could tell she meant it, and so he got out of the car, missing her before he’d even shut the door behind him, but still feeling like maybe he’d avoided some trouble that was much bigger than the huge trouble he’d already gotten himself into.

  Now it was seven years later, and he was in his office, thinking about the last time he’d seen her. “Am I really going to do this?” he said out loud. Then he went down to the Lumber Lodge.

  As usual the bar seemed smoky, even though state law had been insisting for years now that no one was allowed to smoke there. Also as usual, it seemed to Matty, the place was populated by devils, tired, overfamiliar devils whose every action, every word, was totally predictable but who would probably still be able to ruin your life without trying very hard or maybe without even meaning to. He’d gone to high school with almost all of them.

  “It’s Friday night!” Sheilah Crimmins was screaming into her cell phone. She had been pretty in high school. No, she hadn’t. But she’d been prettier. Now her clothes were always too tight, even the clothes that were supposed to be loose clothes, and she always looked red and damp, except for her red hair, which now looked dry and rusty and obviously the casualty of too much product, and she always seemed like she was on the verge of falling down, which was probably why she spent most of her days at school sitting in her chair. She was like a lot of people Matty knew in Broomeville: she would have been an essentially OK person if she weren’t so lonely. Matty would have felt even sorrier for her if she weren’t so loud.

  “It’s Friday night!” she screamed into her phone. “And you’re in the DR, but I’m in the Lodge. You lose, motherfucker, you lose!” Then she saw Matty and said to him, without moving her mouth away from the receiver, “Bossman!” And then she said to whoever was on the other end of her phone call, “That was Bossman.”

  Sheilah Crimmins was the person he was looking for. But just for now, he pretended that she wasn’t. He made his way to the bar, nodding at people as he went. He was wearing his Cornell baseball hat, and he felt, as he nodded, like a bird pecking at something. Ellen was behind the bar, smiling at him, watching him walk toward her, and when he got there, she stopped smiling and asked, “What’s your problem?”

  “I feel like a bird pecking at something.”

  “I was going to guess that,” she said. She poured him a Saranac and handed it to him over the bar.

  “Is it smoky in here?” he asked. It wasn’t really a question. It was smoky in there, and Ellen was one of the people who had made it that way. I thought you weren’t going to smoke anymore, was what he wanted to say next. Instead he asked, “Where’s Kurt?”

  “Out with his cronies.” Kurt was their fourteen-year-old son. They were certain he was getting himself into some big trouble even though they had no hard evidence that he actually was getting himself into some big trouble. In any case, his grades were fine.

  “Is everything OK?” they sometimes asked him.

  “My grades are fine,” he always replied.

  “So, what are you doing here, Big Red?” Ellen asked. Because she knew Matty didn’t like to come to the bar, especially on weekend nights, and she knew he didn’t like it when she called him Big Red, which she did, not because he had red hair or because he was big, but because that was Cornell’s sports teams’ nickname—the Cornell Big Red—and Cornell was his alma mater, and Matty did like to wear his Big Red baseball hat, even to the bar, even on a weekend night, when there would be lots of drunk people with whom he’d gone to high school who’d be reminded, by the hat, that he went to Cornell and that they didn’t go to Cornell, or anywhere else for that matter—all of this was in her opinion—and by his wearing his Cornell hat, Matty ran the risk of seeming like a superior jerk to these people, or of actually being a superior jerk, also in her opinion. And Ellen also knew he didn’t like it when she expressed this opinion, whether directly, or indirectly by calling him Big Red.

>   Was this normal, he wondered, to be married to a woman who did all these things you didn’t like? Did it make it better or worse that she knew you disliked them and did them anyway? Did it make it better or worse that you probably deserved it? Was it possible to still be in love with such a person? Was it possible for that person to still be in love with you? Am I really going to do this? he thought again, still.

  “Whoa!” someone in the bar said. That was the lightning. A second later, there was the sound of someone falling and then glass breaking, and that was the thunder. Matty didn’t even have to turn around.

  “So there’s your guidance counselor,” Ellen said.

  “So there used to be my guidance counselor,” Matty said. Ellen raised one eyebrow, the way she did, and left it raised as she reached over, took off his hat, tucked it under the bar, and then disappeared into the kitchen to get a broom. Meanwhile, Matty rubbed his matted hair, then turned and walked over to talk to Sheilah. She was still on the ground. Her hair was wet now. Either someone had dumped a drink on her head and then she’d fallen, or she’d dumped a drink on her own head as she fell. In either case, someone had put another full glass of something in her hand. It looked like one of those vicious dark-colored drinks constructed of many different, competing kinds of liquor. Sheilah looked at Matty, or at least in his direction: she was looking either at him or at the stuffed moose head on the wall behind him. Whatever she was looking at, or thought she was looking at, her expression was vague and seemed only to be able to communicate something that would never be reassuring, something like, Hey, it’s all good. In fact, this was what Sheilah often told the students who came to her with their problems: “Hey, it’s all good.” And when they said, “Really?” she usually shrugged and said, “Sure. Why not?”