Borderliners Read Free Page B

punishment.
    One tried to be totally exact, because time and the world were. One tried and tried all the way through one's
adolescence, and one could not, and
one came very close to giving up. Yet they had never been able to construct an absolutely accurate
timepiece. They had never been able
to show that time itself remained constant.
    Deep down, they themselves had
never managed to be absolutely precise. Nor had they been able to prove that the world is.

SEVEN

 
                    F or the first week August slept in
the sickroom, then he was moved into my room. Since Jes Jessen had been
ex pelled I had had it to myself.
    At Crusty House, for a few months, they had had a fox. Lent by Svinninge Wildlife Park
as part of the nature study program. Some times Humlum and I would stand in front of its cage.
It never saw us. It looked straight through us and out at the world as it paced
relentlessly back and forth behind the bars. We knew how it felt. How all its mortal despair at being cooped up had
been compressed into an endless,
steady, rhythmic monotony.
    August was like
that fox.
    He got his
medicine at nine o'clock, Flakkedam came with two Mogadon and watched him wash them down with a
glass of water, and then checked with a finger to see that he had not
hidden them under his tongue.
    It usually took about three-quarters of an hour for
them to work. During that time he was very
restless. He paced along the walls and did
not hear you if you spoke to him. Gradually he slowed down;

finally he had to lie down, and he would fall asleep without
saying anything.
    I got through to him because I
discovered that the key to him lay in his movements.
    On the third day I began pacing beside him, brushing past
the bed and the door
and the other bed and under the washbasin and the window and past the closet and then around again, and I kept going even after he had tried to shake me off, and
even though he looked past me, as
the fox had done. At one point, just before he collapsed, I got through
to him. By then I had absorbed his rest lessness
and he had gotten used to me, and the medicine had taken the edge off
his nerves.
    For my part, there was nothing personal in this. I did
not owe him
anything. But he had been entrusted into my care. Not that it had been said in so many words,
but he had been linked with me. If he survived and was allowed to stay at the school, at
least for a while, it
would be to the benefit of us both.
    At the start of the sixth night, in the last minutes
before he fell asleep, he showed me his drawing. He had it tucked in against
his stomach. You
could not help but see it, but I had not asked about it. Now he showed it to me
all by himself.
    He
brought it out and unfolded it—a drawing, on a large white sheet of paper, of the kind that was not to be
removed from the art room.
    It was done in pencil. It was a story. Two little men
moved from picture to
picture like in a cartoon. It was a chain of violence.
    In the drawing, several people got
shot, among them a man and a woman in a room. It could have been a living room, or maybe a
classroom.
    It was hard to look at but, incredible as it seemed, it
was better than the
real thing. So he was not useless at everything.
    He would have started along the walls again, but the
Mogadon were beginning to get to him.
    "I didn't get
any stars," he said.

Karin Ærø stuck gold paper stars on our artwork according to merit. Some people got no stars. A
lot got one, some got two. A very few managed three. If you got three stars three times in a row you also received the honor of a
brown paper bag full of fruit. In the two years for which this system had been running,
only Regnar Grasten, who went on to become a film producer and very famous, ever got fruit, and only once.
    August
was now lying down. He was shaking. I tried to under stand him—why was it so important?—but it was inexplicable.
    "I'm a
habitual liar," he said, "the police said so."
    "They always say