 
A Man Becomes His Self
Mathijs Koenraadt

A Man Becomes His Self

A Novella for Lost Souls

First edition 2018 Copyright © 2018 Mathijs Koenraadt

Published by Morningtime www.koenraadt.info

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Paperback ISBN 978-1790912988 Also available as e-book

Cover photo by Noel Reynolds, CC BY 2.0
One cannot reason with a vulcano.

(Ernst Jünger)
Contents

That Girl from Seyðisfjörður

Olympus Mons

Chaoskampf
1

That Girl from Seyðisfjörður

It was a cold winter morning. I was sitting in a café on Budapest's west bank, the Buda half of the capital. Outside, temperatures were below freezing, so I had to put on my woolly hat for the first time since the summer ended. My hands were still freezing. I had forgotten to bring my mittens. Trying to warm myself over a rooibos tea, which I normally don't drink, I was trying to finish a sketch for a painting I planned to create.

The waitress who just brought me my drink was a young, thin brunette. When she placed my drink on the round table, she was staring at me with a twinkle in her eyes. She offered me a flirtatious smile. Two waitresses had come to take my order today, one shortly after the other. I had to send one away. On a side note, I began noticing how many of the rarest events in life happen twice shortly after one another, never to occur again.

Most people around me were sitting here, working on their computers. The computer is the untalented person's tool. Its progressive algorithms will eventually make everyone equally gifted. If you're a man, simply by going to a café and drawing something with your bare hands can attract young women's attention. To them, especially to the waitresses who see so many men pass by, refusing to use a computer is a sign of barbarism and, therefore, a sign of virility. That's how low our sex has sunk. After we've cloned an army of woolly mammoths, we should smash all computers and go hunting outside with our spears.

My café looked the way I had imagined it the night before. Disappointed with the commercial coffee rooms of the well-known franchise brands, I had longed to find a cozier place. The one I found came as a welcome surprise. Though it was still bright outside, the dimmed lights inside and the café's relatively low ceiling provided a good amount of shade. Every inch of the walls of café Nyugat was covered with beige wooden bookcases. The wood of the cases was made of the same material as that of the tables and floors. I imagined the whole place had been cut from the base of a giant tree, an inverse sculpture.

The old Hungarian books worked acoustic magic. They absorbed echoes and dampened the noise, so a busy place like this one, which was packed with people, still retained its living-room ambiance despite being a thoroughfare for strangers. The trippy music playing in the background wasn't too loud. People were able to have a lively conversation without having to raise their voices. This was one of those rare places where people could sit close together and still be able to hear themselves.

Not surprisingly, this was the only café full of people at this hour. The ones immediately adjacent to it, though equally original in terms of their interior designs, were almost empty. If the jealousy of the neighboring owners had awarded them with the slightest bit of insight, they, too, would have upgraded their hollow acoustics to something warmer. Nothing puts people off more than bad vibes over coffee.

Budapest was a gem, the pearl of the Danuba, the Paris of the East. That's what most temporary visitors said, people who had only seen the belváros, the inner city and its richly decorated buildings. Much of what lay beyond, where most of Budapest's civilian population lived, amounted to sheer urban destitution; streets of Soviet concrete mixed in with Bauhaus façades. Somehow, the attempt to pack as many people together in the most economical way had failed to produce livable neighborhoods. Intellectuals were still trying to figure out why.

The inner city, admittedly, reminded one of Vienna. Its grand cafés—I was never a great fan of them—and their expensive-looking faux-diamond chandeliers offered tourists a trip through lost times, the roaring twenties and the roving thirties. The rest of Budapest reminded me of the bombed-out forties.

When Germanic peoples conquer and colonize a place they intend to pass time in for a while, they leave it behind in a better state than things were before. You don't hear the Hungarians complain about the Austrian occupation that gave Budapest its grand allure, but don't ask them about the Soviets, who forced their children to learn to speak Russian, or the Turks, who destroyed ancient Roman baths to build their own.

Drinking my tea, I was wondering how my life had turned out to be the mess it was in. I was one of those people who had gone looking for themselves on long, solitary travels through Europe. Like a wolf, I had wandered around my birth continent, encircling nations, crossing forests and grasslands. I had spent half my time in major cities and capitals, the other half camping out in the wilderness. Having seen both worlds, I couldn't decide which one to return to.

Most people would never have gone looking for themselves at my age, anyway. I was thirty-four when I quit my job to go on a trip "around the world." I never left Europe. I sold all my belongings and left my past life behind me. Most Europeans tend to fly straight to Thailand after they graduate from their studies. Beer is a hundred times cheaper there than in, say, Norway. The young backpack the jungles and party on the moon islands until the demands of future careers force them to return home. I decided to travel around my own continent, precisely because no one else did. I did meet a lot of young Americans, Canadians, New Zealanders, and Australians, but very few fellow Europeans.

My journey was supposed to be a mid-life-crisis prevention attempt. I hoped to avoid having to go through that kind of crisis by doing what I should be doing today rather than tomorrow. In a way, I succeeded. I thought that if I could find myself, I would return as a better, more stable person. To most people in my predicament, it was the attempt that mattered. Enriched with yet another personal journey, the searchers would turn around, abandoning the road halfway to themselves, and return home to the safety and comfort of the same lives they had been living before.

This kind of soul-searching resembled a bungee jump. You could have died from that fall, but you didn't. You could have found yourself, but you didn't. You bounced back, safely. A lot of people like me found comfort in the safety of the known, in the trials and tribulations of daily life, despite having set out to escape these very things.

I was different. I jumped without a cord, but I didn't die. It takes real determination to cross the void leading toward one's self. It takes a lot of guts to traverse the wasteland lying between self-ignorance and self-knowledge. Oh, I damned myself for going looking for myself! I spent months fighting monsters until I realized they were my own shadows.

Unlike most people, I was too stubborn to turn back. Unlike most people, I had nothing to return to. I had to find myself. There was nothing else left for me to do. Life had nothing more to offer me than the confrontation with my self. Nothing in the world could have prepared me for the inevitable shock that, once you actually find yourself, you might not like what you find.

Well, I found myself, and I did not like what I found.

At first, I didn't recognize my self. I had trouble perceiving my features, but upon closer inspection, the being I had encountered was undoubtedly me. I was a reticent recluse, unable to make sense of people. Nothing had ever hurt my self more than people. I was a man who had felt so disconnected from the rest of humanity, so rejected and so humiliated, that I had come to regard myself as a member of a different species.

If those monkeys driving their cars out there were human beings, I certainly wasn't one of them. Presumably, that's why I rarely got involved in traffic accidents. I always directed my vehicle under the assumption my fellow roadmen were a bunch of primates that had no clue what the dials and levers on their dashboards were meant for.

My travels soon restored my belief in humanity, primarily because it was during these travels that I first met likeminded people, society's rejects, people just like me. After my arrival in Budapest, I spent some time living in a hostel. I stayed for three months. This was the best therapy life could offer me. Sleeping among fellow outcasts in a place that could have been a Viking longhouse, tucked away on the seventh-floor attic of a historical Serbian concession, I spent nearly every night after dinner talking to people in the common room.

Guests exchanged ideas about the meaning of life, about politics and philosophy, about manhood and Hungarian pastry—things normal people aren't interested in. But if I had known then what I know now, I would have told my transient friends to disengage from their quest for self-discovery. With the wisdom of hindsight, I would have told them, "Beware, for if you set out to find yourself, you might not like what you find."

One of the hostel's guests, an American of my age, with a white middle-class attitude, who had been working an IT job in Australia for several years, told me he was a retired BASE jumper. He had jumped off the edges of apartment buildings, cliffs and antennas, out of hot air balloons, and gotten away with it without a scratch.

He had had his close encounters with death, he said. When I asked him if he had picked up BASE jumping for the sake of adrenaline, for the fun of the scare, he answered he had never felt anything. Nothing. He had done it solely because he had felt so dead inside that he had to go to extreme lengths to feel anything at all. He was a good cook, though. That left me wondering how it was possible that people who said they couldn't feel anything could work such culinary wonders.

His senses were in perfect working order. This man, let's call him Brand, desperately wanted to feel emotions again. It became clear to me that this man had lost his self. He was just trying to find his self again.

I suggested he was probably so afraid of feeling that he kept running away from it. What better way was there to escape the fear of feeling than by jumping off the edge of a tall building? The fact that he had chosen to wear a parachute and operate it successfully to navigate his landing surely meant he was afraid of something. So, he did feel. He felt an attentiveness of mind to look after himself. In fact, carrying his parachute meant he was afraid of hitting the ground at the speed of a bullet. If he really hadn't been able to feel anything, he would have jumped down headfirst without the aid of nylon.

This man was afraid to find out that he was, after all, a feeling human being. Like many others before him, he copped out. He turned back halfway to himself, gave up BASE jumping, and returned to the comfortable life of an information technologist who spent his free time preparing home-cooked meals. His life was the same as the one he had had before he had picked up parachuting.

That doesn't mean the lives people return to have to be comfortable. It means people find comfort in the discomfort they have grown accustomed to. Some people can lie down very comfortably in a nest full of nettles, simply because they have been lying in one for so long that they refuse to do something about it.

I, too, had once found comfort in the discomfort of my job. I was an accountant. Then I decided to do something about it. I was determined never to return to my old life again. Never. So, I took precautionary measures. I burned my old life, which I almost immediately regretted doing. A few months later, I reached another point of no return. I found myself. I found myself, because I was a stubborn reactionary prepared to push back against life.

That wasn't the only thing about myself I didn't like. As I have said before, I didn't recognize myself when I met my self the first time. My deep self-ignorance meant I had almost marched on into the infinite nothingness, forever losing myself on the endless planes of aimlessness. I almost became a lost soul. Almost.

I remember it well. I was walking on a snow-covered trail through the Nordic mountains. With each step, I sank into the snow up to my knees. My backpack was too heavy. I was exhausting myself. The snow made a pleasant crunchy sound when I stepped on it. After several miles, the trail hardened. I was now walking on thick, snow-covered ice.

Around me stood the icy mountains of a realm normal people don't enter. Quite unaware of my surroundings, too preoccupied with my thoughts, I marched on, pushing myself ahead. Having reached a certain altitude, I encountered a plain where the snow had disappeared enough to reveal the frozen surface underneath. I kept walking until I noticed I wasn't walking on solid ground anymore.

Below my feet lay a frozen lake. A sea of darkness was flowing underneath the layer of ice supporting me. The dark below absorbed all light. It was so dark I could not see my reflection nor that of the mountaintops around me. The wind had died down and everything became quiet. It was this tranquility that woke me up from my thinking.

Then I noticed where I was. I had arrived. I was standing on the very bottom of my self. Unafraid, I took off my backpack filled with survival gear, just in case the added weight was too much for the icy floor to bear. In case of an emergency, I thought, I could use the backpack as a sort of buoy to keep myself afloat in my self. Such wishful thinking had thwarted my successes in life more than once. This time, it would be no different.

With the burden of survival lifted off my back, a burden of guilt also fell off my shoulders. I proceeded to kneel down onto the ice and fell forward with my hands stretched out so I could bring my face close enough to the frozen surface to take a better look at what lay below. My eyes first focused on the icy layer itself, but when I moved my face a bit closer, I could see the deep. I was staring at infinity, and it was staring back at me.

A shim of a man appeared to be standing on the ice below me, upside down, like a mirror image that had come to life, with its feet toward me and its head pointing down toward the darkness. The shim dropped to his knees, too, mimicking my own movements, then fell forward, upward from my perspective, and moved its face closer to the ice. I remember being anxious to see who or what that shim might be. The figure's face moved toward me in such a way that our eyes would eventually meet. Full of anticipation, I got scared.

Precisely at that moment, when our eyes met, I felt a lightning strike my body. The thick layer of ice I was resting on instantly shattered into a million pieces. I fell into the darkness. I had gone looking for myself, and my self had come looking for me. I had fallen into the blackness of my own being. Nothing was going to stop my fall. The Nordic mountains rapidly vanished behind my back until they disappeared from my range of vision. My backpack full of burdens stayed behind, too.

In a sense, I felt relieved. Everything became dark. All sense of direction left me. It was incredibly cold down here. I wasn't falling through water or air but rather through nothing at all. There was just nothing there. My body froze, and I could no longer move. I could no longer close my eyes. I was choking in the nothingness, for I could no longer breathe. An unusually intense fear took hold of me. All physical sensations in and around me disappeared as if reality itself had disintegrated.

The only sensation that stayed with me was the unbearable sensation of falling. Unable to move my limbs—I wasn't sure if I still had any at this point—I grabbed hold of the only thing left in me. I wrapped my mind around the fall. My fear turned into a panic, compounded by the desire that I wished to scream, knowing that I could not open my mouth.

Then I realized that my fall was accelerating. My thoughts were racing. If I was still accelerating, then what was I falling toward? I reasoned the acceleration indicated that something, or someone, was pulling or pushing me toward it. That meant there still had to be something out there waiting for me to crash into. I sank deeper into despair. Everything I had ever called 'real' was gone. It hit me—I had fallen into my self.

I wasn't falling toward something. I had gotten stuck in a cycle, like the Moon around Earth's orbit, except in a way that kept speeding myself up. While I was falling into my self, my self was falling back into me, and so, I had arrived in an endless cycle of acceleration that I knew I had to break out of in order to recover my physical being. Nobody was going to save me from me but me.

How are you supposed to save yourself from falling into yourself if there is nothing left to hold on to? The falling sensation started to drive me insane. I had reached the bottom of my self and discovered that such bottoms cave in when you step on them. When the bottom gives out, there's just nothing there. That insight brought me salvation. I could save myself by thinking my way out of my self. Could I trace back the steps I had taken to get here?

My memories were still with me. My personality was still there. I could still use my mind to imagine things, dream things up, think of the past, present, and the future. Even the memory of smell and touch was functioning well. The languages I spoke were with me. Reality had collapsed onto me, perhaps into me, but with the power of my mind, I could will a response. Using my imagination, I could recreate reality, then reincarnate myself into a creation of my own.

Panic ate away at my thought processes. I knew one thing. I knew I didn't have much time left before the speed of the fall would absorb my sanity. Then, I would remain lost in my self forever. I had to think of something, fast. I chose to think about two things. First, I imagined my self sitting on the second floor of a cozy bar where the lights were dimmed and the walls covered with bookcases. Second, I imagined myself gone.

One, two—lo! I had given birth to my own reality. I was sitting in a bar in Iceland in a fisherman's village called Seyðisfjörðr. No more than six-hundred inhabitants were living here. The place lay between two mountain ridges with the ocean's waters reaching deep into the fjord. At the base of the mountains lay several small farms.

It was a cold evening in the fall. I was sitting upstairs. A hole in the floor offered a view of the ground level. I was sitting here by myself, alone, waiting for the girl I had met to return with two beers. The sound system downstairs was playing trippy music. The bar was nearly empty, except for the girl working the counter and three guys having some drinks downstairs.

Earlier that afternoon, I had met a girl walking along the fjord. I had been on my way to climb a mountain. She came walking toward me from across the street. There was no traffic. There was no one else there. I hadn't met anyone else for hours. Still, as we passed each other, I briefly thought to myself I should ignore her, but my less misanthropic side forced me to wave at her. I walked up to her, we shook hands, and we chatted for a couple of minutes.

I told her I was on my way to climb a mountain. She was on her way to an art gallery, one of many in this surprisingly artistic enclave. A bit reluctantly, which would later prove to be her play, she accepted my suggestion to meet again later for an early dinner. We didn't exchange cell numbers or social media handles but rather agreed to meet the old-fashioned way, "In front of the blue building, at five o'clock."

We forgot to check each other's watches. We had both come in on the same ferry from Denmark that had sailed past the Faroe Islands. The time in Iceland was two hours ahead. I assumed she, being a woman, had set her watch right. I hadn't, but I reasoned I should meet her at five o'clock local time nonetheless. For once, my assumption was right.

When she came back up the stairs holding two beers, I smiled at her with gratitude. We had decided to have one drink together. That afternoon, we had dined at another place, a pizza and pasta restaurant. She only half-finished her pasta; I wolfed down the whole pizza by myself. My hunger mesmerized her. She probably hadn't imagined anyone could eat that much. Maybe she thought I was going to eat her up next.

After dinner, she left to make a phone call to her family. I thought it was something women say to excuse themselves if they don't really like a guy. I thought I had blown it, and that I wouldn't see her again, fickle as the women in my life had been. I walked her back to her hotel. We were holding hands. I can't remember reaching for hers. She suggested we should go for a drink afterward. I didn't quite catch it when she said it, but she made a vague reference to how comfortable her bed's extra-thick mattress was.

We had met an hour after her phone call in front of the bar. Upstairs, she was sitting across me with her back to the wall. I took my first sip of the beer, a local draft, though I couldn't really tell the difference between beers, except for the difference between cold and lukewarm beer, between a freshly poured mug and a beer that had died some time ago. This one was fresh and cold, so I remarked it was a good beer. She thought I meant to say I was a connoisseur of sorts and that this beer was somehow superb and special. It wasn't. It was just a beer from a town with six-hundred people. Luckily, she was as ignorant about beers as I was.

Sandra was blond, fairly tall, even by Nordic standards, and seven or eight years younger. She told me her mother was from Denmark, her father from Sweden, and that she had grown up in Norway after moving there from Denmark at a young age. She could still speak a little bit of Danish, but when she did, she sounded like a child, since she had stopped developing this language after her childhood.

She wasn't as intellectual as I was, which made conversing with her pleasant. I didn't feel the pressure to prove how smart and knowledgeable I was—or thought I was. It's a common problem among the overeducated. When talking to people with too much educational baggage stuffed in their heads, they tend to regurgitate all they know about the world without paying attention to people's emotional states, needs, or desires.

Like me, Sandra had decided to go on a solitary trip around Iceland. Mine would last several weeks, and hers would last several months. Women don't usually travel alone. They tend to travel in packs of two if they're serious, or more than two if they're partying. Sandra had ventured out into the world by herself, a world where solitary men roamed. On the first day of her trip, she had met me. We got to the point where we trusted each other enough to disclose more personal things.

— "Why did you decide to go traveling?" she asked.

— I hesitated and said, "Oh, I'm just trying to find myself. I've been working as an accountant for a long time. I can't do it anymore. Working with numbers every day hurts my head. I'm actually a creative person who landed the wrong job by accident. Being an accountant pays well, but I'm all burnt up. I want to become an artist. I decided to quit my job to try to find inspiration while traveling."

— "Wow. You quit your job as an accountant? Are you from a big city?"

— "Yeah, kind of. Amsterdam isn't that big compared to, say, Istanbul or Shanghai. People from Asia think of Amsterdam as a quaint little village. The Dutch think Amsterdam is a big city, though. It's a bit expensive, but not as expensive as it is in Iceland."

— "I think it's funny how everyone in the big city lives in a little box. And it's really noisy in the city. I don't like cities. I'm from the countryside. Where my parents live, it's super quiet. There's nothing there, just birds and sheep. Rarely a car drives down our road at night. That would immediately wake me up because it normally never happens unless there's an emergency."

I'd spent fifteen years living in big cities, the first generation of my evolutionary bloodline to do so. This might sound strange, but it was true. Both my parents were born on farms. They were the first generation to settle in a small town of more than fifty-thousand people. I was the very first of a line of farmers to have been born in a small town, and the first to move to the big city. Each of my grandparents had lived and died on farms. Before my grandparents' forebears became sedentary farmers, they were Indo-Germanic nomads roaming the planes of Northwest-Eurasia.

— "I'd like to live in a place like that. I like quiet places. Are you from this sort of place where there's only one bus connection that only makes one stop once every other day?"

— She giggled. "Yes, that's how it is. Nowadays, I study at a rural art school. It's hidden in the woods. Some students from the city can't cope with the quiet. They get bored quickly, because there's nothing to do for them. Some of them quit. I love it. If it's a quiet natural environment, it means I can focus on what I'm working on. I love to write poetry for hours on end. There's no better place to do that than in the quiet woods."

— "I think I would also like that," I said.

— "What kind of art do you want to make after your travels?"

I had to think about that question for a bit. I had told everyone I quit my job as an accountant to become an artist, but I hadn't put much thought into the type of art I was going to make. I was still trying to find myself.

— "I'd like to be a painter, but I don't like to paint on canvas. I want to paint the world."

She looked at me, confused.

— "What do you mean?"

— "Well, imagine you're standing on the moon looking back at the Earth through a telescope. You have a perfectly clear view of the African continent. I would be on Earth, and I would drum up a nation of people to form a motif spanning across Central Africa. Together, they would form the contours of an eye. Millions and millions of people would be waiting for my sign to light their torches at night. Watching this event unfold from the moon, you would see the Earth looking back at you with one giant, fiery eye the size of a continent. That's what I want to do. I want to turn the whole planet into an artwork. I would call it The Cyclops."

Accounting taught me to think big. The girl seemed impressed. I had made it all up in the moment. I asked her what kind of things she did for relaxation.

— "Where I study, there's a sauna by the lake. I go there every other day. I take a hot sauna, jump into the cold lake, go back to the sauna, and repeat that a couple of times. The old people do it, too. It keeps them young."

I thought to myself, It gives old people heart attacks.

— "What kind of poetry are you currently writing?" I asked.

— "Right now? I don't know yet. I'm looking for inspiration. I love to write stories about people, their thoughts, and their conversations. For example, I dislike novels that try to create a whole new universe full of planets and galaxies characters have to explore, chasing some meaningless plot device, like a magical cube or something stupid like that."

We kept on talking until I realized my beer was done, and no one else was coming up to disturb the two of us. I had run out of things to say to her and was unsure about what to do next. For a few moments, we just sat there, awkwardly thinking unspoken thoughts. She folded her hands together between her crossed legs. I thought she was getting cold or needed to use the bathroom.

I decided to tell her something important about myself. I wanted to open up to her about things modern society wouldn't tolerate to be spoken out loud.

— "Sandra, I think the world is too full of people. I don't see the point in having billions of people on Earth. Why should we continue to grow up to ten or a hundred billion people? Everywhere, we have been building caches of people called cities. They just keep absorbing numbers.

"Amsterdam may not be as bad as London, but still, people aren't ants. People are human beings. Our ancestors used to live in carts pulled by their cattle. They were horse riders and foot soldiers. They were a people on the move. Modern civilizations have come to a halt. We're stuck, and we should unstick ourselves. We have the right to roam the world's plains again. To our forefathers, the horizon must have seemed infinite. Ours don't reach across the street, because buildings are blocking the view."

I was delighted to discover the girl took my words lightly. She wasn't offended or angered by anything I had said. Being a girl from the countryside, she had felt largely the same way about cities and the industries required to maintain them. Cities are the cemeteries of our species, like an elephant graveyard. It's where we go to die.

— "I kind of agree with some things you are saying," she said. "I also feel people in the countryside have stronger personalities. They are unique. In the city, people all think alike. Their personalities are as narrow as the streets they are living in."

— "Exactly! That's how it is. Have you ever seen one of those internet memes where they force a kitten to develop its head in a square jar? They come out with square faces. Cities do the same thing to people's minds. Urban society mangles people's personalities. It disfigures people's psyches. Modern society has put free-range humans into offices and apartment boxes, and people come out of those with mechanical personalities programmed to perform the most efficient tricks for the economy.

"Above all, we must avoid wasting time thinking for ourselves. That's why I quit my job. I don't want to die in the city. I guess what I'm really trying to do is unfold myself. The city has made me square and flat, but I want to become full and round again. Does that make sense?"

She nodded. Our awkward silence returned. I decided to get up and sit next to her. She didn't say anything, didn't smile or signal otherwise what she wanted. When I asked if she liked to kiss, she shrugged her shoulders without saying anything. She meant to say that if I wanted to kiss her, I should just kiss her. I shouldn't ask for permission, despite a recently passed Scandinavian law requiring me to do so.

I put my arms around her. Our kiss was a relief of tension for both of us. She was a good kisser, and so was I. We took the time to enjoy it and kissed each other long and slow. Her hair was tied in a knot atop her head. I grabbed hold of it and thrust my tongue further back. Intermittently, we paused to talk some more. She noticed the look in my eyes.

— "You like kissing, don't you?"

— "Yes, kissing is good against stress."

I think we spent about half an hour kissing. When we were tired of it, we sat there for a while, holding each other. The bar was empty. The three men downstairs had left after finishing their last round of beers. I had been slightly worried they would have moved upstairs and hijacked the girl I was with. They hadn't. I had her to myself.

— "Do you think you and I are dreaming this place up?" I asked. "I mean, with our thoughts? Imagine we are the creators of this bar as if nothing outside of this place exists unless we think of it first. Maybe we're not in Iceland anymore but somewhere else. Maybe we'll walk out the door and find ourselves in a big city like London."

— "You have some pretty far-out thoughts," she said. "I see why you don't want to be an accountant anymore. You're a creative person. I don't know, though. I don't think we're imagining this place. I think it's real."

— "Will it still be there when we close our eyes?"

She didn't answer. We had enjoyed each other's kisses, but it was getting late. The bargirl downstairs had turned off the music. When Sandra signaled she had enough of my kisses, I took a firm hold of her head and kissed her even stronger, letting her know I was ready to take charge of her for what was going to come next.

— "What are we going to do now?" she asked.

— "Let's go to your hotel."

— "Oh, I don't know... I don't think we should do that."

— "We'll go to your room to kiss some more. We can have some tea."

— "Are you sure?"

— "Yes. We'll go, and then we can do the things we both like to do."

— "O.K."

We got up and left. Outside, it was freezing cold. We were still in Iceland. We walked past a stave church with a red roof. It stood by the bay where the two mountain ridges that sheltered the village from the worst weather met. Sandra's hotel was nearby, a picturesque two-story building with just four rooms; the owner was staying in one of them. She led the way.

Her room was quiet. It had an armchair, a small bathroom with a shower, and that incredible bed with its two-feet thick mattress. When Sandra shut the door, she was so eager to start that she tried to jump up on me. I wasn't prepared for her attack.

— The first thing she said was, "We can only do it with a condom."

A condom! I didn't have one on me. She hadn't brought any, either. A girl decided to travel the world alone and didn't bring condoms. A guy met a girl for a drink and didn't think of what might happen next. I remembered seeing a condom vending machine hanging on the wall in the bar's restroom. We had to go back, I told her. She looked slightly upset. The condom requirement was her last line of defense, barring me from entry.

We walked back to the bar, hand in hand. I excused myself to the girl who was closing shop and pretended to have left something in the bathroom. I retrieved two condoms with the coins in my pockets. Back at Sandra's place, I told her to lie down on the bed. I didn't want to get jumped on again.

For some reason, when I take my clothes off in front of a naked girl, my perceived shyness goes away. Clothes make the man, they say. I don't believe that anymore. Clothes tame the man. I felt our nudity restored the natural order of things. It felt it brought back some balance to the universe.

We took it slowly, at first, though I already knew this was going to end rough. She had a beautiful body with smooth Scandinavian skin as white as I had ever seen. Her grandfather was from Greenland. I enjoyed touching her. While I was staring at her womanly hips and thighs, she was staring at my chest. I hadn't been to the gym in a long time, but I had been doing what I called my shower routine. I would push my hands against the walls like Hercules standing between two columns. I would also put my hands underneath my knee cavities to try to lift myself up, flexing my biceps. As a result, I was in good shape, to the girl's approval.

We fooled around a bit without talking much. I kissed her between her legs. That instantly knocked her out of her consciousness. She started breathing heavily and let out uncontrolled moans. I was getting impatient. I laid down on my back to present myself. Without asking, she returned the favor, then climbed on top of my chest to express her dominance over me. I didn't like that, grabbed hold of her, and rolled her over to her side.

I jumped out of bed, looking for the condoms I almost lost underneath layers of clothes scattered across the floor. I put the thing on. There, I stood before her, ready to take the city of love. She was lying there, open and full of desire. When she saw me coming toward her, she wetted her lips and made a grabbing motion toward it with both hands. She needed it badly, I figured. I took hold of her and went to work with some aggression that had been building up in me all day. It caught her by surprise, but she enjoyed it. The sudden loss of control over her body wasn't something she had practiced often, I could tell.

I was too strong for her. She had no choice but to surrender to me, the wild man who had jumped out of his clothes. After some time, she pushed me away. I was in a reasonable enough state of mind to let her escape my clutch. For a second, I thought she had had enough, that I had been too rough with her, and she was going to ask me to stop. Instead, she was just trying to turn herself left and right to reposition herself. She was going to try out something new she probably hadn't done before.

On her hands and knees before me, she pushed back against me. I took the cue and pushed her head down onto the mattress. She went nuts. Her face was all red as if she was overheating. She was mine, I owned her—and that's when I made my mistake. I went too far. With my flat right hand, I spanked her on her right buttock, twice. She took it well, I thought, and I was about to give her more. Abruptly, she pulled loose. She sat upright on her knees, facing me, and asked me to stop.

— "I'm so sorry," she said. "This is a little bit too much for me, with the spanking and all."

She was almost crying. She was apologizing to me for it even though I understood I had been at fault. She waved her hands helplessly in front of her bosom, almost begging me to stop. Luckily, I wasn't some out-of-control loon. I laid myself back down on the bed. Relieved, she made herself comfortable by my side. She wasn't mad. Resting her head on my arm, she caressed my chest.

— "I like your chest," she said.

— "What are your boyfriends like?" I asked.

— "They're very soft, like me."

Both of us were too spiked to be able to fall asleep. Sometime after midnight, she asked:

— "You can't sleep either, can you?"

— "No."

— "Shall I make some tea for us? It'll help us fall asleep."

She got up and prepared the tea using a standard-issue electric water cooker provided by the hotel. I put on my underwear and sat down in the armchair. While she was sitting on the bed, holding her tea, she held her legs together in a way that made her look like a mermaid. I was the creature that had fished her out of the sea and ravaged her.

— "Why did you decide to become an accountant?"

— "I never wanted to. I think I always wanted to be an artist, ever since I was ten years old. School sent me down the calculus path. They said I was too dumb to be creative. I was the guy who should have studied history, literature, or even languages, but my teachers kept telling my parents I should study maths or physics. School broke me. For the past ten years, I worked really hard to prove myself. Then I realized I was throwing my life away. When my next promotion came up, I quit."

— "What do you think will happen to you when you find yourself?"

— "I don't know," I said.

— "Hmm..."

After teatime, we went back to bed to rest. I noticed the second condom lying on the nightstand, unused. The tea hadn't calmed me down. I would have loved to get back to pounding her, but I restrained myself. I resisted the urge to coax her into a second round and pretended to be asleep.

She slept for a couple of hours. I realized how dangerous it was for a woman to engage in casual sex. It takes a lot of guts for a woman to give herself to a man she had only known for a couple of hours, especially if he was going to hold her sleeping body in his arms. I could have been a psychopathic murderer. She was lucky I was just an accountant who wanted to be an artist.

She woke up just in time for my departure. I had a bus to catch. It departed once every two days. If I missed it, I would have to spend two extra days in this fisherman's fjord. I got dressed without showering and kissed her goodbye. She was sitting on the bed with her arms around her knees, resting her head on her hands. I gently stroked her hair and placed my hand on her shoulder.

— "You're a very soft woman, aren't you?"

— "Yes, everybody says so."

Outside, the morning sun was hovering above the mountain ridge. For once, life had been good to me. My decision to become an artist had already paid off.
2

Olympus Mons

The bus turned out to be a transport van with room for about eight passengers. Since I was carrying my backpack, I had to occupy two seats. The van didn't have enough storage space in the trunk. It was a Monday. This morning, the van doubled as a school bus to take kids from the fjord to their school in the next town. They would spend the whole week there, sleep on the school compound, and return back home on Friday.

A young man sitting in the back, a fifteen-year-old, pimpled redhead with Down syndrome, was playing Burzum on his headphones, loud. He understood some things others would never find out about. The kid was banging his head up and down and stretched out his right arm to make a bull's horn gesture with his fingers. I smiled at him. The teen girl sitting next to him smiled back at me. We were headed for Egilsstaðir, a farmer's village of about two thousand inhabitants. The driver would drop the schoolkids off, then take me to the town's bus stop next to a local information center.

The trip up the fjord was a wild one. Down below, the weather had been fairly calm, apart from the occasional drizzle and gusts of wind breaking through. As soon as the van reached the top of the mountain ridge, though, hell froze over. We drove straight into the maddest blizzard I had ever encountered. I feared the wind was so strong it would blow our vehicle over into the ditch, but to the driver, this was perfectly normal weather. He had no trouble commandeering his vehicle, skidding through the hairpin bends, and evading oncoming traffic.

At Egilsstaðir, a bigger bus would pick me up for the continuation of my journey. Originally, I had planned to go straight to Akureyri, the island's unofficial northern capital, Iceland's second-largest city. Just about twenty-thousand people were living there. Each summer, tourists flocked there to go on whale-watching trips. I decided to leave the whales alone.

For about an hour, I waited outside the information center, which happened to be closed on Mondays. I kept checking and double-checking the timetable to make sure my bus would arrive. This was another one of those things I didn't like about myself. I had difficulty letting go of things that might go wrong.

The Icelanders built their homes with the most economical materials that helped them fight the island weather, notorious for its rapid changes throughout the day. It could be sunny in the morning, raining an hour later, alternating sunshine and pouring hail throughout the afternoon, then end the day with snow. Icelandic architecture was not a pretty sight. The outer walls of their homes were made of ribbed metal plates locked in place with screws. Certainly, it resisted the tear and wear of rainfall, snow, and heavy storms, but it made the homes, both here as well as in the capital of Reykjavik, look generic. They looked like construction workers' canteens, similar to those steel cargo crates hauled off a mammoth ship and transported further inland on trucks.

These metal-plated dwellings looked nothing like the longhouses of the Viking Age, made of wood and overgrown with moss and grass. If modern transportation hadn't arrived to bring the Icelanders their imported building materials, I suspected there wouldn't have been people living on the island today. By now, the descendants of the Old Norse settlers would have felled every tree. It would have turned Iceland into another Easter Island. Perhaps, in a futile attempt to draw the world's attention, the Icelanders, too, would have erected strange staring stones facing Norway, crying, "We're stuck here! Help us!"

Modernity did arrive, eventually. The island people have managed to keep a healthy distance from its influences. A well-known American fast-food chain once attempted to establish a flagship store in the capital, but the locals refused to eat there. They would rather drink milk straight from a cow than consume foodstuffs produced at the lowest cost in the world. The place went bankrupt. The last hamburger sold was put on display in a museum under a cheese dome. A decade later, the thing still refused to decompose, confirming the locals' belief it wasn't real food.

I remembered Egilsstaðir was named after one of Iceland's famous heroes, Egil Skallagrimson, literally Egil, son of the bald-headed one. This historical figure started killing people when he was a child, then embarked on a life-long career of murder and plunder. From what I remembered reading, Egil's father had angered his son by doubting his strength. So, a seven-year-old Egil stormed out of the house and murdered one of his father's farmworkers. In response, his angered father threw the housemaid off a cliff into the cold waters below. He dunked a rock on her head to make sure she would die and drown.

Such characters naturally became national heroes, which, to me, made perfect sense. Nobody will ever remember the guys who used to check the stamps on people's outgoing mail before computer scanners took their jobs. Nobody will ever honor a checkout girl as her nation's heroin, no matter how many billions of items she handled without error. Nobody cares about the guy who writes the books. People care about the hero, for he shows us we still possess strengths. In times of great stresses and turmoil, it is to those strengths we must return if we wish to survive. We all know it's true.

Modern men could learn a thing or two from the old Vikings. If you were a fertile young woman who encountered such a man at a drinking festival, and he seated himself next to you demanding that you sail to Iceland with him to be his wife, you would say yes or he would kill you. You wouldn't dare to play head games with men who had killed forty on their way home from work. These were men who clubbed their last enemy to death with the other arm they had lost in a swordfight. No, a girl wouldn't think of refusing such a man's sexual advances. She would reward him for choosing her and the next summer, she would bear his child.

Egil was a manhunter. He would sail back to Norway to hunt, rob, and kill Laplanders for a couple of months each summer until he grew tired of it. For the sport. Men were wolves back then, utterly incomparable to the sissified weasels modern materialist culture has conditioned men to be. If a group of men from our time somehow got lost in a Nordic storm and were transported back to the Viking Age, they would be ridiculed and killed. Men, I thought, should become real men again. They should be hunters, warriors, and killers, and they should go on razzias to rob the prettiest girls from their father's homes.

There is, however, a misconception about the ancients that they were, supposedly, a lawless people. Though the Icelanders founded the world's first parliament, they obviously didn't have a police force or a national army to keep the population in check. They didn't have TV and radio to infect people's minds with government lies. In the old time, few successful strongmen might have gathered bands of men to fight on their behalf, but these would have ranged in the dozens, at most, certainly not in the thousands. Peace was kept in a very different way, one that required an interplay of male honor, shame, and the threat of revenge.

For example, a man was allowed to kill, but he wasn't allowed to kill and cover it up. The latter would have been unmanly; a sin considered worse than the crime itself. If your murder were found out, the cowardice of your coverup would stick with you for the rest of your life. "There goes that coward," people would say. People would point at you. Your cowardice had disgraced your family. If you had been an honorable man, and if you really had to kill someone, you would do it in plain sight for the world to see.

Your descendants would write your saga and, depending on how many men you had killed, you might become your people's national hero. The many extant Icelandic sagas revering their murderous ancestors attest to this. This is also the reason why modern commentators, whose weak personalities developed in matriarchal urban societies, think the peoples of the old were bands of ruthless, murderous barbarians, irrationally preoccupied with spreading death and destruction, even long after Christianity arrived.

They are wrong. By making hidden murders shameful, murderers who lived up to their crimes consequently attracted the revenge of the victim's family. Shame, and the possibility of blood revenge, kept most potential murderers in check. However, because of this, men without families were more likely to become victims of murder. There wouldn't be any family for them to avenge their deaths.

Ancient strongmen, thus, had to be good family men. They had to treat their brothers, uncles, and cousins with respect to forge an alliance with them. A male alliance wasn't some anti-feminist conspiracy but rather a man's, and his family's, only available form of social security in a time without a central government. Bands of men, willing and able to avenge the murder of one of their blood brothers, fiercely defended the peace.

A white tour bus, imported from Germany, arrived on schedule to pick me up. It had comfortable seats and an onboard coffee machine. I didn't drink coffee. I had never had trouble waking up in the morning, getting out of bed, and going about my day, so I never understood the point of drinking coffee. During the day, I was always wide awake. I guess I didn't drink coffee for the same reason professional athletes didn't need energy drinks to win a competition. They're better than the rest.

Just as I boarded the bus, I changed my plans. I had thought of going to Akureyri, but now I decided to stop halfway and exit at Lake Mývatn, a natural volcanic lake that lay beside a volcanic crater I wished to explore. I paid for my ticket, sat down, and enjoyed looking out the scenic windows during the trip. Iceland's landscapes can't stop intriguing a visitor from afar.

Outside, a couple stood by the side of the road holding a sign. I had asked them about their journey, and they told me they were hitchhikers. When I told them I was taking a bus, the girl repeated, "We're hitchhikers." They were from Eastern Europe. Travelling was so expensive for them that they couldn't afford a bus ride. I was from Western Europe, where salaries were still ten times higher than in the East, and even I thought Iceland was expensive. I wished them luck.

My bus drove through hilly terrain, past some of the geysers spouting hot water into the air. I had never seen those before. A group of tourists was standing around one of them. Occasionally, a tourist trying to take a better picture would move too close and get severely burned.

That reminded me of an African-American man I had met on the inbound ferry. He had told me he planned to hike across Iceland's roughest mountain trail. It was the same trail where a white couple had died the year before. Heavy storms had caught them by surprise, even though surprising weather was Iceland's hallmark, and they should have come prepared for it. The black man I met was going to do it by himself. I feared for his life, hoping he would realize black people don't always have to do what white people do—and die alone in the snow.

I could tell I was entering primordial lands. A small town, even smaller than the one at Seyðisfjörðr, sat by the quiet lake. I didn't figure this out until long after my visit, but the entire valley was, in fact, a giant volcanic region. The thing I had confused with being the actual volcano was just the Hverfjall crater. Underneath the valley lay the Krafta network.

The valley offered a three-story hotel, a lake-side campsite for campers and backpackers, and pristine wilderness to explore. Hauling my backpack off the bus, I headed straight for the campsite. A surprisingly green lawn lay waiting for me by the lake. Several other hikers had put up their tents. You could recognize the bright colors of their fabric miles away. A herd of sheep was lazily grazing on a hillside in the distance. A simple shack made of dark-brown wood served as the guest kitchen.

I pitched my tent near a park bench with a table, a dozen feet from the lake. A building by the road served as a check-in point where I should pay my dues before I left the next morning. Outside temperatures were above freezing. If you kept on the move, you would stay warm. I had to sit down to eat. With my frozen hands, I pried open a package of Swedish knäckebröd. I ate the crispbread with some slices of cheese. In the North, my diet had unconsciously changed to take in more protein. I was drinking a lot of milk and eating a lot of cheese, yogurts, and dried meats.

Where I was sitting, I had a good view of the lake. I wondered what kind of wildlife could survive in it. Then I noticed several different species of ducks swimming around in it, and some pairs of them nesting in the reed closer to the lakefront. I got up to take a better look. Instantly, a black-feathered duck with a white beak began making a ton of noise. Flapping its wings carelessly, it swam away from me. I was standing too close to its nest. The bird had assumed I was a predator, and it instinctively tried to deceive me into chasing after it, luring me away from the nest.

Who or what taught ducks to sacrifice themselves to save their offspring? If such ordinary mammals could understand the principles of self-sacrifice, perhaps we humans had a lot more, or perhaps a lot less, in common with our distant evolutionary cousins than we were led to believe.

To my north, across the lake, I could make out the contours of three hilltops. To my east lay the massive grey Hverfjall crater. More than two thousand years ago, the crater had been formed when hot magma dropped on the underground water flows, sending hot vapors up into the air with the explosive force a meteorite impact.

There wasn't much else to do here but go for a day hike. I removed the top part of my backpack containing my passport and other valuables and turned it into a rucksack. It fit a can of water and some snacks for underway. Which way should I go first? Before heading to the crater, I decided to hike up to the top of the hill my bus had gone over on my way in.

The paved road leading back up the hill saw no traffic. I passed a couple of homes and couldn't help but notice the stark contrast between the pitch-black soil and the bright-green bushes growing by the side of the road. The volcanic earth seemed fertile. The road back up was a bit longer than I had anticipated. I kept going anyway. When I reached the top, I sat down at another park bench.

I began to think about my environment. I wondered, What, exactly, is reality made of? From here, I could see the fumes of an industrial sulfur lake rising up. In the distance before me lay Mývatn. To my left lay a wilderness of bushes and tall plants, and beyond it gray and red dunes. The volcanic crater rested on the horizon. What am I doing here? Why am I here?

The girl I had left behind that morning preoccupied my thoughts. I felt good about the deal we had made. I had slept with her and then I hit the road. Of course, that's how she had planned it before she had even met me. Women may say things like this never happen to them. They will say, "I'm not that kind of girl." It's not so. Most women have the luxury of planning their sex lives weeks, months, if not years ahead. I figured Sandra was going to sleep with many other people on her trip, and I knew I probably wasn't.

Today, I had arrived in some remote part of Iceland, where few people ventured out in the cold. I decided to get busy instead of freezing. I hiked back down to reach the start of a trail leading through the bushes toward the crater and toward whatever else I might find there on my way.

To a woman, sex is a matter of 'who' not 'if'. To a man, it is a matter of 'if'. The 'who' comes secondary. This is a generalization. Most men would never want to have a child with an ugly woman. In the old times, many men wouldn't get married. They would stay the unkempt members of a warrior caste. In part, I think, they accepted this celibate fate to avoid having to marry ugly women. Still, that's why today's societies encourage drinking. Alcohol drastically lowers men's standards.

The most decisive factor determining whether a man will end up sleeping with a beautiful woman rather than an ugly one is his self-confidence. Confident men love themselves more than they love other people. They don't feel the need to lower themselves to other people's levels. As a consequence, they can exclusively approach attractive women for sex and, if they are rejected, they won't feel offended or hurt because they still love themselves.

If an insecure man mustered all his courage to approach the girl of his dreams, a single rejection would shatter his self image. He might not approach another woman for the rest of the year.

The worst thing that could happen to a woman, romantically speaking, is if the man she approved to rough her up for a one-off turned out to be the sort of guy who keeps calling and texting her. Women are sick of these needy types. Women prefer to sleep with men who don't really give a damn about them. That way, she knows he won't come back to stalk her.

The 'block' feature on phones and social media was invented for women, not for men. Men love to receive a message from literally anyone. Many men only receive one message per year; from their mothers for their birthdays.

A signpost by the side of the road sent me off in the right direction. The bush trail would be about eight point six miles from here to the crater. I thought that was quite a walk, but I had nothing else to do, so I went ahead. The trail was a narrow one and snaked around rock formations, bigger and smaller boulders, hills, and other natural obstacles. Before I noticed it, the bushes had risen to over my head. I had become a wild man, lost in Mother Nature.

So, too, must the first Viking arrivals have felt. They didn't come here to find themselves. They came here to lose themselves. They were trailblazers, the first human inhabitants of their own mini-continent.

Of course, I could feel very emotional after having slept with a woman. The experience would usually stay with me for a day or two before I forgot about it again, before I started fantasizing about the next girl. Sleeping around was a risky business, though. I was at grave risk of falling in love.

Sandra must have known that's how men ticked. She only slept with me because I had told her I was planning to take the bus out of the fjord the next morning. That reassured her I would be gone the next day. If I had planned to stay longer, in all likelihood, she would have picked another guy. She certainly would not have picked the guy she had met at the art gallery that day we met. He was a local, see? He would have lingered around. He would have wanted to hang out with her for several more days, holding her hands and eating cupcakes together. He would have been the guy texting and calling and punching his fists through the wall for her refusal to reply.

Women, precisely for this reason, love to sleep with men on the road. They can be fairly sure such men will leave them. They know such men will encounter other women who will help them take their minds off the ones they had slept with before. If a guy's not too shabby and knows how to talk to women, the wandering vagabond can get a lot more sex from women than the propertied, settled, and married man.

Women who aren't actively looking to bind a man to her enterprise, the ones who aren't looking for an emotional attachment, have to be careful who they sleep with. The classic dichotomy of alpha versus beta male has little to do with the alpha male's ability to get laid. The decisive quality of a man who is selected for a one-night stand is that he doesn't intend to propose to marry the girl. Instead, he lets her know upfront she's just a toy to him, and that is why she lets him toy with her.

Too many men who fail to get laid are looking for a substitute for the love they didn't get from their mothers. Beta males think every girl who looks at them wants to be their new mommy. Healthy women think that's creepy. They can only respond to such men with disgust. It's really the beta male's own fault he can't get a girl. He's not really looking for sex. He's looking for motherly affection.

Girls don't want boys. They want men. They want Vikings who have sharpened their teeth in the shape of wolf fangs. The only time a woman would ever chase after a beta male is if the state legalized murder. She would bite his neck and bleed him like the prey he is.

On the trail, I felt at home. I had to look down at my feet a lot to avoid breaking my ankle on a rock, since I hadn't brought proper hiking shoes. Breaking an ankle on a trail probably wiped out more Vikings than their battles ever did.

Focusing on my steps, I began to forget about my immediate environment. An animalistic drive took hold of me. Still feeling confident from last night's sexual encounter, I traversed the trail with the mentality of a predator. If I could become my favorite animal, I would be a bear first, a wolf second. A bear fits my physique better, but a lone wolf fits my psychology best.

I took some twists and turns through the jungle, sometimes jumping up or down a rocky ledge. For a while, I wondered if I was really alone or if I would encounter someone else. Just as I was thinking about this, I bumped into a girl coming from the other direction. She was pretty, but I wasn't interested in her. I had set my mind on reaching the crater before nightfall, so I was in a bit of a hurry.

She had seen the animal look in my face. Maybe she thought I was a potential rapist, I thought. I snapped out of my aggressive mood for a moment to greet her with a friendly smile. A woman can tame a wild animal with a single look. The coast was clear. We passed each other without further ado.

I have noticed something strange about women. In the natural order of things, they come first, and I mean this most metaphysically. Whenever I was walking down a street and people were walking toward me, women had always noticed me before I had seen them. By the time I noticed them, even when I was looking straight ahead, they had already checked me out, from top to toe, and assessed my sexual value. It was almost as if women could see a man just before he came around a corner, just before he entered her reality.

From this observation, I concluded that reality must have been made up of multiple layers. These layers are somehow fused together so they can seamlessly interact with each other. Women, however, must exist in a layer closer to the source of it all. In this hierarchy of realities origination from said source, women come first, and men come second. Women give birth to both women and men, but men cannot give birth. Life only propagates itself through the lineages of women. Men exist to help women propagate life—as their water carriers, taxi drivers, or service personnel.

Thanks to modern technology, modern men are about to become obsolete. Once robots can do all the things men can do, and once women learn to program them, which might take a while, the need for biological men disappears. A certain species of lizard, the Mexican whiptail, in fact, only has one sex. It can give birth to new females without having sex with males. The lizard propagates itself the way the strawberry plant does, with clones.

If men wanted to prevent women from turning into self-propagating lizards, they would have no other choice but to wage war on modernity and bomb humanity back to the Bronze Age.

I thought it must be easy for a woman to get a man to do what she wants him to do. Upon sensing a woman's gaze, in a reflex, most men would want to prove what good worms of a husband they could be for her. They think they will get laid by playing the obedient pup, happily humping up her leg, which, in reality, puts women off.

If men spent just a few minutes a day listening to women, they would find out what women really are like. The first thing a girl told me was she didn't care what a potential love interest looked like. Not at all. His looks were irrelevant. She didn't care how good-looking or ugly he was. The bad news was he had to be a good dancer, a good cook, well-dressed, prepared to move to a tropical island with her, and willing to start a beachfront business with her, which I assumed meant he had to be rich.

Of course, she was describing her next boyfriend, not the guy she would cheat on him with. Indeed, let me explain an important insight. For thousands of years, women didn't have Father State to provide for them. There was no state-sanctioned income redistribution from men to women. There were no armies of feminists to defend women's rights. Women were forced to rely on their tricks to get men to raise their children for them.

The essential trick evolution handed down to women works as follows. A woman would pick any man to be her husband or boyfriend as long as her father outclassed him, physically or otherwise. This guaranteed a woman that a husband wouldn't abandon her while she was pregnant, in which case her stronger or more powerful father would go after him and talk some sense into him.

However, the man whose child she would bear wouldn't necessarily have to be her husband. Once she had secured her boyfriend material, she could get any other man to impregnate her.

Boyfriend types don't like to believe this, but I have witnessed the incriminating behavior on many occasions. I had met a girl once who was working for a major financial company in Lower Manhattan. She and her boyfriend were sitting across me in a bar. They were twenty-six-year-olds, and both netted over four-hundred-thousand dollars per year. They were rich and successful. They had been together for eight years, thinking of having kids. I was just an accountant trying to make ends meet.

While the dude was busy answering company emails on his phone, she said to him she needed to visit the bathroom. I waited for two minutes, pretending to be mute, and, strictly out of curiosity, went downstairs to see. There she was, waiting for me.

I could write a book about such encounters. I have made out with girls while their boyfriends were ordering beers at the bar. I roughed up a married woman at a block party while her husband was watching. Afterward, she even apologized to me for having to go home with her husband. I don't take pride in this behavior, but it does feel good to be the guy women cheat with. I vowed never to be the other guy. How could I? I have seen women's dark side. There's no place called home for me anymore.

Little did I know at the time, struggling my way through the Icelandic jungle, that the girl from the fjord had already sent me an email. We hadn't exchanged phone numbers, only email addresses. Her message read that she "normally never did something like this," and that she had been "confused" and felt "light as a feather" in my strong arms. She also told me she was in a relationship with someone else. She wished I wouldn't take it too hard. I didn't. I was busy scaling another crater.

After about an hour of walking, I discovered a ravine. Colorful flowers with purple, blue, and pink shades colonized the rocky walls. It was possible to climb down to the bottom of it, which I did. At the bottom lay a pool, a natural hot spring. It stank after sulfur. The volcano may have been extinct, but something underneath the surface was still very active, pushing pockets of hot water up to the surface.

Judging from the rope hanging by the wall, I understood the locals sometimes came here for a swim. I took off one shoe and dipped my foot in the water. It was pleasantly warm, like a hot bath. I didn't feel like getting undressed, so I put my shoe back on and climbed back up to the trail.

What kind of wildlife would have been native to Iceland before the Old Norse settled here? I had no idea. Sheep, horses, cattle, I presumed, had all been imported from mainland Norway, brought over on their Viking ships. I wondered how many bulls had drowned on their way here. How many had jumped over the ship's bow in despair? None, probably. Animals weren't that stupid. People were more likely to do something like that.

I walked on for a short while until I discovered a herd of Icelandic horses. They were captive, grazing in an enclosure. What must horses be thinking of people? They would tell us to get off their backs. They would tell us what we do to sheep and cattle is a racketeering scheme. They would tell us to stop sending their sons to the slaughterhouse and milking their daughters for profit.

That's why animals didn't talk. If there had been any other species on Earth who could snitch on humans, the snitches would soon find themselves on the list of near-extinct species. Horses wisely kept their mouths shut about the crimes of men. If horses could talk, people would have killed them all. Mute, they seemed content with the life allocated to them. Their worry-free demeanor made me pause. For a while, I stood there, staring at them.

My distant ancestors were Indo-Europeans. They were a group of people who spoke a similar language, thousands of years ago. Close to three billion people now speak a derivative of this early Indo-European language, including Greek and English, to name two. A large part of the Indo-Europeans' success came from a willingness to adopt new technology. They were among the first humans to domesticate horses and among the first to use the wheel to build carts and wagons. That's how they spread across the Eurasian continent.

The Indo-Europeans were patriarchal peoples. After marriage, women would join the men's kin. They believed in a male deity, Father Sky, whose name lives on in Zeus, Jupiter, and the Norse god Týr. Men ruled over their tribes and herds. Living a mobile life, in their wagons, a life not far removed from the American settlers going West or from the South-African Boer people on their treks, the Indo-Europeans on their horses roamed the Eurasian continent at speeds previously unimaginable.

They would reach India, parts of West-China, Iran, and all of Europe. It would take at least until the fourteenth century for another group of horse riders, the Mongolians under Genghis Khan, to repeat the stunt. Pulling their carts, the Indo-Europeans colonized Europe, replacing and intermarrying with the older peoples of which only the Basque language survives in Northern Spain.

I liked to imagine that my soul—for I truly believed I had one—was made up of the combined experiences of my ancestors. If, for thousands of years, my ancestors had been horse riders, it was no coincidence that I should stop to look at these horses and stand in amazement as if I had rediscovered my long-lost herd.

The horse-riding, American cowboy was more than Hollywood fiction. Cowboys were the latest installment of a much older, ancestral spirit that lived on in Westerners. The Viking spirit, too, was not much different from the Indo-European spirit. The latter wished to ride against the wind, the former to sail against it, too, and eventually, we even flew against the wind with our flying machines, all the way up to the Moon.

For thousands of years, the Indo-Europeans and their many daughter peoples had revered a pair of male twins, the sons of Father Sky and the brothers the Dawn Goddess. The twins were called Manu, the founder of mankind, and Yemu, the first man to die. So, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon, we heard and saw the echo of an ancient mythological belief. The mythical twins of yore had come to life. If men would one day colonize the Moon, Neil Armstrong would truly be moonkind's founder.

The future of Indo-European man, I believed, had to lie in space travel. It alone could bring about Western people's apotheosis. I moved on, leaving the horses alone with my overactive imagination.

I wished to get out of the bushes and find some kind of plateau from where I could see the horizon to orientate myself. Up to this point, I had no idea which way I was walking. The shrubs grew thicker until I reached an obstacle, a rocky hill. It was quite steep, but many human visitors had eroded away several steps that helped me climb up.

I reached a plateau, just as I had imagined. I could see far over the bushes. In the distance lay the three mountain peaks behind the lake. To my east lay the crater I was trying to reach. I wasn't close yet. Behind me, someone else came up the platform. It was time for me to leave. I wasn't in the mood for conversation. I said hello and went on my way, down the other side of the rocky hill.

I was getting bored. I wanted to see some variation. Shortly after thinking this, the bush trail ended and turned into a landscape of sand dunes. It felt like walking on the Moon without a spacesuit. Leaving the green of the bushes behind, I entered a desert of pitch-black to soft-grey sand. Footsteps in the sand made it easy to follow the trail others had left for me.

I was walking in Armstrong's footsteps. When I jumped down the sandy hills to land a few feet below in the loose sands, I experienced that sensation of weightlessness. My destination was now clearly visible. The crater ahead of me might as well have been Olympus Mons, the biggest crater on planet Mars.

To me, it occurred that women often overvalued their sex. I wouldn't mind sleeping with a woman who happened to be a prostitute, but I would never want to pay for it. For this reason, I always turned down street prostitutes harassing me on my way home after a night out. Whatever they were charging wasn't worth it. I tried to be nice to them, at first, afraid of offending a whore, but soon they annoyed me like flies, and so I started telling them I didn't like them.

Certainly, sex has some value to me. Sex has about as much value as a hot meal prepared for two. If you prepared it together—she brings a cabbage and some oil, you bring sausage and some yogurt—the whole ordeal might take anywhere from five minutes to two hours, depending on how hungry you are and how much fun you were having. As with everything, it would take some time to heat things up.

What would a meal for two cost nowadays if you prepared it with ingredients from a local market? It shouldn't cost you more than a couple of dollars. So, that's why I refused to pay for sex. I was, however, willing to cook a girl dinner once in a while or have her prepare it for me, and I would finance the ingredients—six or seven bucks, max.

Women, of course, tend to price things differently. They believe their sex is worth a man's best working years, a mortgaged house—so he could never leave her without financially ruining himself—two cars, three vacations a year, a kid in Harvard, her tennis club subscription, and a pet panda, and then let's not forget her beach-front business that would never make a profit, but she would use it as a getaway to sleep with tons of guys behind her man's back.

That's why I would rather be the other guy, the guy she cheated with.

Not long after my walk on the Moon, the sands below my feet changed color. I emerged from a sandpit, moved around the corner of a large dune, and found myself on planet Mars. The sands had turned from grey to red in various shades. Here, a tiny creek divided the landscape. It smelled of sulfur. A closer look revealed its bright blueish color. The fluorescent water contained small, shiny pebbles. It looked as if the Milky Way was flowing through the creek.

Truthfully, most women aren't very experienced, sexually speaking. I have deflowered women who almost neared thirty. They weren't ugly. Some of them came from extremely conservative families. One was a medical student. It took me all night to convince her. Another told me if her father found out she was sleeping with me, he would kill her. She was thirty-two. Another girl's father was a Muslim imam who had forbidden his daughter to sleep with the infidel.

This goes back to my evolutionary theory. By definition, boyfriends and husbands have to be the guy who submits to the girl's father, either to the father's authority, power, wealth, or physical strength. The guys women find sexually attractive have to be the stronger ones who outclass the girls' fathers in some way, primarily in terms of physical strength.

The weak man bows to the father-law-in; the strong man inseminates the girl (and never calls her again). Women who grow up without a father end up having massive psychological difficulties in adulthood. Without a father, they have lost their anchor in reality.

Many, if not most, women I have met between the ages of twenty and thirty have never had a one-night stand. It might be me—I only hang out with classy girls. A girl I met told me she had met her first boyfriend when she was sixteen. He stole her virginity when his mom walked in on the act. On her hands and knees, she froze like a dog.

Nevertheless, she stayed with him for another eight years. That means she practiced the same tricks, in two positions, with the same guy for eight years straight. Would anyone call her experienced?

The dunes I wandered through also became rather boring. I had to hike another mile or so to the crater. I switched off my mind to go into autopilot. When I finally reached the top of the crater, I was underwhelmed. It was just a big, messy sandpit. It had a diameter of about three-quarters of a mile. I didn't feel like falling into it.

I noticed a man down there. He appeared to be hurling rocks around, organizing them in place. Before I could finish my thought that I hoped he wasn't trying to write something stupid, I saw he had used the rocks to spell the word LOVE. I decided to turn back and stay away from that creep.

On my way down, the weather changed. It began to drizzle icy drops not quite hard enough to be hail but not soft enough to be rain, either. I had enough of this hike and wished myself back in my tent inside my warm sleeping bag.

At the base of the crater, I discovered a dirt road. I thought it might be a shortcut leading to Lake Mývatn, in which case I could avoid the bush trail altogether and walk back to my tent on a more comfortable road. I gave it a go.

Ten minutes in, I encountered another specimen of Icelandic fauna—sheep. Unlike the horses, these weren't bound by some enclosure. They were walking freely along the dirt road. I didn't want to bother them, so I passed them on the other side of the road. That's when I noticed their stares. Twin rams stood there, staring at me. Wherever I went, their eyes followed. These sheep looked much stronger than those I remembered from mainland Europe. They were fluffier, too, in an awkward way. Their wool gave them a square appearance.

Underneath their wool, it was easy to notice the rams packed bulging muscles. For the first time in a long time, I felt scared. Had I trespassed their territory? Wasn't I supposed to be here? More sheep joined, all females. They were paying little attention to me, as usual, but the twins clearly considered me a threat. For a moment, I imagined next morning's local news headline would read, Tourist found dead after trespassing sheep territory.

They looked like they were thinking of headbutting me in the knees. I retreated back to the safe world of human bush trails, leaving Neil and Buzz behind.
3

Chaoskampf

My two-person tent was just big enough for me. I had opted for a bright-green trekker's tent with a mesh to keep mosquitos out and an outer hull to protect against the rain and the wind. The thing, in and out of itself, couldn't keep you warm, though. Before my departure, I had bought the extra-tall person's sleeping bag, stuffed with layers of compartmentalized down that could keep a person warm at temperatures below freezing. My bag came with a spacious pocket for my feet, but the top part barely fit around my broad shoulders. I couldn't turn my body around in it.

On my way back from the crater to the campsite, I had eaten up my beef jerky snacks and some Swedish crackers. I wondered what the Old Norse people would have eaten on their trips from Norway to Iceland, to Ireland, or to Normandy? Did they fish? Did they bring dried or smoked meats? They certainly didn't eat fruit. Bananas and oranges didn't grow in their part of the world. Potatoes weren't introduced to Europe until centuries later. I imagined the early Viking explorers probably survived on dry meats, dairy products, and bread.

All I had left for dinner was some of the cheapest spaghetti and dried Bolognese sauce of which I had brought too much. I went to prepare myself a basic pasta dinner in the outdoor kitchen shack the campsite provided its guests. The shack's wooden boards had wide gaps between them through which a cold wind blew. I had to put on my mittens inside to keep myself warm while waiting for the water to boil.

The kitchen offered plenty of steel pots, pans, and two gas-powered stoves. At least gas was included in the camping fee. To prevent the winds from blowing out the stove, you had to place a steel windshield around the pans. I cooked a little too much spaghetti, but I was feeling hungry enough to munge down a plate or two.

A group of Australians joined me, two guys and two girls, couples. They had rented a car from Reykjavik's airport and were driving around the island on the recently updated highway. Not so long ago, cold winters would have cut off the southeastern part of Iceland. Before the new highway reached there, you couldn't get through the mountain pass without a snowmobile.

When I asked one of the Australians, a tall Nordic-type girl wearing a blue bandana across her forehead, whether they were traveling clockwise or counterclockwise around the island, she had to ask her boyfriend for help to answer the question. Being a child of the digital age, over ten years younger than I, she was either stupid or she had never been able to make sense of the movements of an analog clock.

The boyfriend had no trouble understanding my question and explained they were traveling clockwise. I was going counterclockwise, but we figured we would probably meet again in Reykjavik, our mutual end destination. In fact, we would meet, but the Australians didn't recognize me anymore. At Reykjavik's inner-city campsite, I would wave at the girl with the bandana, saying "Hi!" to her face, but she looked straight through me as if she had seen a ghost from the past. That's when I concluded the girl wasn't just a child of the digital age. She was also stupid.

After eating my two servings of vegetarian Bolognese, I performed my cleaning duties and hit the sack. It had started to rain, and I was tired. My tent was situated on a slight slope so the rain would run down into the lake past it.

I always loved the sound of rain falling down on rooftops. For a mammal to be able to sleep in a dry, quiet place is one of those fundamental luxuries we have taken for granted. The sound of rain hitting my roof but not wetting me reminded me of how rich one can feel, even if one possesses very little. I had a tent, and I was master of my dominion.

I wrapped a t-shirt around my eyes to block out the moonlight. At night, I kept on my woolly hat to prevent heat from escaping my body through my top. Focusing on the sound of the rain, I fell sound asleep. I dreamed of being condemned to dwell in this valley for the rest of my life for having failed to pay my camping dues.

The next day, I got up, forgot all about my dream, and cycled through my morning routine. I broke down my tent, cleaned it, wrapped it up to fit back into my backpack, and headed for the bus stop that would take me further to Akureyri. The stop, at a parking lot across the street adjacent to the campsite, amounted to nothing more than a single lantern pole with a sign and a timetable attached to it.

Failing to make sense of the timetable, I headed to the local information center to ask for help. A lady in her forties spoke the words that disrupted my mood.

— She said, "The bus doesn't go today. The next departure is tomorrow."

Of course! I should have known. Buses in these rural areas didn't go every day. They went every other day. I should have checked the bus schedules first thing on my arrival. I remembered meeting the Eastern Europeans who were hitchhiking around the island. I had never hitchhiked before, but it sounded like a more attractive opportunity than having to spend another day camping by the lake.

I walked back to the bus stop. Before I started waving my thumb in the air, since I didn't have any cardboard with me to write a destination on, I noticed a girl, probably a teenager of around nineteen years, was standing a bit further down the road, waving her hand at cars. She was wearing a blue backpack and a bright yellow coat. I approached her.

— "Hey, are you also hitchhiking?" I asked her.

— "Yes," she said.

— "What's your name?"

— "Hilda."

— "I'm from mainland Europe. Where are you from?"

— "Iceland."

— "Oh, so you're traveling around your own island. Are you on vacation?"

— "Yes."

Often when I approached women for a chat, they tended to hold back words. I could never tell whether they did this because they were shy or because they didn't like me, so I taught myself to press harder until they either caved or made me feel unwelcome.

— "I planned to take the bus to Akureyri, but it doesn't go today."

— "Yeah, I know."

— "Maybe we can hitchhike together?"

— "Uhm, O.K."

I tried to keep a conversation going with the girl, but she wasn't interested in long-form communication. She was looking down at her cell phone a lot more than at me. That made me feel unwelcome. Maybe she thought two people trying to hitch a ride hurt her chances of finding a ride for herself, but she didn't say so.

I did find out she had embarked on a solitary trip around her native island a couple of weeks earlier. She had decided to spend about three months of exploring her world. Hilda was a freckled redhead. Very early on in the country's history, the Irish had intermingled with the Old Norse.

It took us quite a while before a car stopped to take us further. The driver said he was only going to the next town, but we accepted the offer. We thought the place might be busier and that we would see more traffic there.

Sitting in the passenger seat, the driver, an older fellow over age fifty, told me he was the local priest. He was a lot more talkative than the girl.

Christianity may have been over two thousand years old, but most Northern Europeans didn't acquaint themselves with Catholicism until the faith began spreading northward around the seventh century. Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, and Icelanders were among the last to be converted. The last heathens fought their conversion fiercely, but, in the end, I thought, the Catholics' higher birth rates helped to Christianize the North. Surviving pockets of heathen minorities, mostly from the countryside, were gradually replaced until they either converted or disappeared.

Though the Catholics went to great lengths to erase the memory of the old heathen culture—runestones were repurposed to build churches, the works of heathen scribes were presumably burned, songs about heathen heroes were outlawed, the heathens' heaven was made Christianity's hell—the heathen spirit survived. As much as the early Christians had tried to assimilate the beliefs of their subjugated peoples, the heathens, in turn, repurposed Christianity to suit their own needs.

The priest driving the car told us something about the origins of the volcanic lake along which we were driving. The volcanic lake, he said, had been formed by waters pushed up from volcanic activity below. The volcanic Krafta network underneath the valley continuously deposited all sorts of geological wealth into the lake. At the same time, melting winter snow and rain coming down added other kinds of wealth to the lake.

Together, these two sources made the lake particularly rich in plant life. This abundance of natural wealth was the reason why dozens of different species of ducks had been attracted to it and were able to coexist peacefully.

I reasoned the same thing applied to modern multicultural societies. What we called diversity was a result of some underlying wealth, not the other way around. Being diverse didn't make you rich; being rich afforded your diversity. Diversity was a luxury, I thought. If, one day, the volcanic deposits into Lake Mývatn dried up, its plant life would die off, and the ducks living on and around it would have to battle it out with each other. Like the lake, multicultural societies were always at risk of reverting to the survival of the fittest.

One group of people I knew would protest my belief were academic thinkers. Academics were so devoid of a soul, so disconnected from their selves, they failed to grasp even the most elementary principles of what constituted our natural reality. To academics, things had to be either all good or all bad, all black or all white, all homogeneous or all diverse.

A few centuries ago, such academic thinkers thought they ought to increase the yields of Northern Europe's forests by selecting the most profitable species. From scratch, they designed artificial forests where tall trees stood in straight lines. At first, it worked wonders. Profiting from the rich soil that an older, more diverse flora had left behind, the homogenous, single-species, managed forests yielded exceptional profits—until the soil's riches were depleted.

Upon realizing diverse forests brought about richer soils and, consequently, offered more durable long-term profits, the academic thinkers began advocating diversity in response to homogeneity. Instead of leaving forests alone to return to their natural states, they began managing diversity. They began transplanting palm trees to Scandinavian pine forests and pine trees to the African jungles because they believed diversity, even in its most ridiculous form, should eventually yield more durable profits.

So, the diversity mantra took hold of the minds of thinking men. All forests, academics now believed, had to become equally diverse—but only of the highest-yielding kind of diversity, which negated all other kinds of diversity. Indeed, when academics spoke of diversity, they meant managed diversity. When academics spoke of durability, they meant profitability. They certainly didn't mean the diversity that arose naturally when people left forests alone.

Lake Mývatn happened to host a large number of duck species because volcanic activity enriched its soil. The ducks, however, hadn't made the lake rich; the rich lake had made the ducks. Other lakes, not as blessed with natural resources, could never be the host of such a diversity of species. It would be silly to invite ducks from all over the world to find a better life on Lake Mývatn. The lake would overcrowd, its wealth would dry up, and, subsequently, most ducks would starve.

True natural diversity, I figured, guaranteed neither inclusiveness nor equality. Naturally diverse forests hosted different species with differing yields. They had dominant species and minority species struggling for their survival.

Natural diversity meant there would be forests with mostly pine trees such as in the North, forests with mostly broad-leafed trees such as in the South, and many forests with a great variety of species somewhere in between. No two naturally diverse forests, however, would have the same division of species. Each forest would have a differing yield average. Species would be unequally distributed among forests.

What the academics failed to grasp was that neither a managed homogenous forest nor a managed diverse forest was natural forest. A natural forest had no foresters, managers, or academics trying to increase its short-term and long-term yields. Whether or not a state pursued homogeneity or diversity to increase its forest yields, that didn't make forests natural, it made them managed.

I decided that a natural forest should have predatory animals in it to keep state representatives out.

Indeed, in our time, states and their supporters began applying the lessons learned from forestry to human populations. By making humans more diverse, they reasoned, for example, through forced immigration, and by reducing the size of native majorities down to about thirty percent, by sabotaging the natives' reproductive functions, states hope to increase their long-term tax yields.

In all, academics dreamed of creating a single global state and a maximized yield for the human species—a global forest with as many palm trees in the North as there would be pine trees in the South. This ridiculous concept of diversity, of course, had nothing to do with either nature or reality. The diversity advocated by politicians only served to increase government revenues from taxation.

Managed homogeneity had made all forests the same. Managed diversity also wanted to make all forests the same, namely equally diverse. No low-yielding diversity would be tolerated. The state and its academics weren't interested in true diversity, which yielded natural inequalities and left room for pockets of equally natural homogeneity.

Natural diversity resulted in both mixed populations as well as homogeneous populations. By itself, real diversity didn't favor one condition over the other; it rather let individuals decide for themselves. Any kind of state involvement led to a guaranteed loss of natural diversity since state actors would instantly dismiss low-yielding populations—regardless of how diverse they were.

If people, both homogeneous and diverse, wished to live free from taxation, they would do well to drown their managerial elites in the deepest lakes and hang state-financed academics from the highest branches.

Neither national states nor the global state wanted people to live free from taxation. They were only interested in high-yielding tax populations. Its managers were perfectly willing to incinerate everyone else. That was how diversity for profit's sake became the religion of ignorant men who refused to listen to the people.

The priest dropped us off in front of a hotel. The three of us wrongly assumed it would yield greater hitchhiking opportunities. Hilda and I were stranded. For about an hour or so, not a single car passed us by. The few that came next had no interest in taking along passengers. When a family left the hotel to drive off in their SUV, the girl went over to them to explain our situation.

They were an Israeli family. The family's patriarch—a short guy of about five foot three—said they were driving back to our starting point. We were welcome to hop in the roomy vehicle to hitch a ride back. Hilda and I accepted.

I had never met Jewish people up close before. They didn't look anything like the American Ashkenazim I knew from TV, who so often looked like Germans to me, so I assumed these were Sephardim. I sat next to the daughter, who offered me some chewing gum. All Israeli women had to go through military training, I remembered. You didn't mess with them, so I silently chewed on my gum, which had a strawberry flavor.

This was that moment when I realized how different Germanic and Semitic peoples really were. Germans take the shortest route to a given destination. Jews take the scenic route. German men are huge. Jewish women are petite. Israelis had a nice country. We had diversity.

Growing up in Western Europe, outside of Germany, I had only heard bad things about the Germans. They had stolen our bicycles during the war. One Nazi officer had shot my grandfather's friend through the temple during an interrogation. They threw my other grandfather in prison for six months for refusing to work for them. After the war, this grandfather fled Europe, fearing the Soviets would take over.

I didn't really know what to say to the Israelis. Instead of driving straight back, they drove around the lake, clockwise, so Hilda and I got our free scenic tour. We drove past the three mountaintops I had noticed the day before. Up close, they looked rather unimpressive. They weren't mountains, just hills.

Looking out the window, the calm surface of the lake pulled me in. As so often, I could easily get lost in serenity. Even if the whole world around me was burning, if there was something calm nearby, something I could focus my mind on, I knew I would make it out alive.

The family dropped us off at the same parking lot where I had started that morning. I had come full circle. Was I ever going to escape this valley?

Hilda got off the van first. After thanking the patriarch, I looked around for her. She had disappeared without saying anything. I had wanted to say goodbye to her, give her a kiss on the cheek. A minute later, I saw her walking in the distance, toward the lookout point I had visited the day before. She was going to find herself one day, and she wasn't going to like what she would find.

I was feeling down. I had tried to get out of the valley and struggled through all kinds of hoops only to return to the same point where I had started. Because I didn't feel like trying hitchhiking again, I surrendered myself to the circumstance and returned to the campsite. This time, I pitched my tent among the shrubs closer to the road, away from the lakefront. I had had enough of the quacking ducks.

That day, I spent it reading the one paper book I had brought, eating some more meatless Bolognese for dinner, and hiking a short bit along the lake for just a couple of hours until I got sick of doing things for time's sake. I went to sleep early that night without feeling tired.

At night, I had a dream, a lengthy one. I dreamed of walking through a busy airport, bigger than any I had ever been to. Corridor after corridor, mall after shopping mall, passenger gate after gate, there seemed no end to it. The airport in my dream was a world of its own. Each time I thought I had found my destination, I appeared to have entered another section with even more gates, waiting rooms, and restaurants.

Each time I turned around, the configuration of halls and rooms changed. Everything around me was constantly shifting, but only when I wasn't looking, in the dream at least. That way, I could never make sense of where I was. What my eyes saw appeared to be real to me. What my eyes didn't see appeared to be a dream with a dream.

I ran and ran, asked around, bothered many airport staff members with questions. How do I get to my gate? How do I get to my destination? Am I going to miss my flight? The people in my dream were friendly in an unpleasant way as if they were part of a tongue-in-cheek conspiracy that plotted to send me off in the wrong direction.

Among the crowds of passengers clogging up the corridors, I encountered an unusually tall Asian man. He was in a hurry and carried a black suitcase. With his white shirt and beige khaki pants, he stood out from the otherwise casually dressed herds. I never saw his face. Because this person was the only distinguishable character in my dream world, I followed the man for a while. Though he outpaced me and I kept falling behind, bumping into people, following his lead led me to an outdoor section.

Exiting through automatic doors, the world I saw outside was a sunny place with a blue sky and palm trees neatly lined up along the airport's façade. The place was, however, empty. There were no buildings and no people. Only a stone square lay at my feet, built in a Soviet communist style but without the gigantesque statues of Soviet memorial sites.

The man I had been following disappeared into the distance, beyond the horizon. Still dreaming, I recognized where I was. I had discovered the emptiness of being—my own, to be precise. For a while, I just stood there, not knowing what to do. I was standing outside of the automatic doors, I thought. When I turned around to find the door I had just exited, the whole airport had vanished.

The emptiness of being had encircled me. Standing there, like a soldier on watch, waiting for something happen, it was hard for me to swallow the fact that nothing was ever going to happen here. The square itself, made of square tiles organized in repetitive square-shaped motives, gave the emptiness a sense of meaning. I kept staring ahead of me at the empty horizon across the endless square. Then I leaped onto it.

Could a man give meaning to his existence by acting brave, even if he didn't know what he was doing? The first motif I had stepped on lured me to its center, a single white tile. Nervous sensations overwhelmed me. Walking over there was hard. I felt an intense pressure of tears welling up behind my eyes but, nonetheless, overcame the need to cry. I pushed my tears back and swallowed my sadness.

I looked up from the motif's center to see the skies above. That's when I saw the tree. Branches of a cosmic tree, the size of a galaxy, were hovering over me. I had mistaken its dark base at the edge of the square for a horizon. Its trunk was so wide it spanned my field of vision. The tree was out of reach. It was too far away. It would take an eternity to walk over to its trunk.

What if you dreamed of a strange dream like this, and when you woke up, your soul had to stay behind in the dream, condemned to wander around the emptiness of being? Would you do it? Or, would you accept another option and set your soul free but leave your self behind in the dream? Would you take your soul's place if it were taken hostage? I think that's what I did that night. I set my soul free but my self behind in the dream.

Stuck, I reasoned if there was no meaning to human existence, I might still give it one. What more radical way was there to give meaning to the emptiness of being than by one's desire to destroy it? I had a better idea. I was going to insult the emptiness of being by building a house.

With my fingernails, I managed to pry loose one of the faded tiles and swing it ten feet away with an angry grunt. The square hole revealed darkness underneath it. I kneeled down to touch it. It felt extremely cold, much colder than ice. I broke away another tile, then another and another until my activity revealed the pitch-black floor supporting the square, the nothingness itself. Unsure if I could stand on it, I put some pressure on it with one foot. It held.

I knew I had to make the hole bigger. I felt destined to break open the emptiness of being and reveal its secrets. With the tiles I had pried loose, I could build a stone house. I could turn the emptiness into a habitable place for my self. Was it the house that gave meaning to the man or the man who gave meaning to his life in a house?

I don't know how much time I spent building my house on the planes of emptiness. There was no way for me to tell time, and it's possible that it took me an eternity.

Lacking mortar or any building equipment, memories of the igloo hut my father had built for me when I was a child entered my mind. I stacked the square tiles vertically, on their edges, three tiles thick, to create a full circle with a diameter of about ten feet. I laid a second layer on top of the first. This layer contained one less segment. I made sure the top segments covered the lower section, where two bottom tiles met.

My architectural monstrosity held upright. I built a two-layer, circular wall that stood solidly. I added the third layer in the same manner. I built two columns to help construction, though the circular design of my house should, in principle, have prevented it from collapsing on top of me. I managed to add the fourth and fifth layers.

It was hard work. I was sweating and getting thirsty. The thirst didn't stop me. In the back of my head, I knew this strange world wouldn't feed or drink me. Building this hut out of concrete tiles could have been the last thing I ever did. Because of that sense of immediacy, I was sure I was going to finish it, no matter what happened.

I was determined to give meaning to the emptiness of being by building myself a house. Of all the souls who had crossed this plane, I was the one, the only one who'd decided to fight back. I built myself a stone hut. Any other soul passing through here long after I had died would be forced to recognize my efforts. Here, they would say, had lived a man who, faced with the unbearable nothingness, built himself a house.

While building my stone hut, I locked myself inside. I didn't care. My home reminded me of the Pantheon in Rome. I imagined it so. It was nothing like it, but it had a hole in the top that shone a ray of light down at my feet, projecting a picture of the world tree that hovered high above me. Getting out of here was easier than I thought. I removed three sections of bottom tiles, two more above it, and one more above that one.

When I crawled out of my hut, it started. I heard a series of loud bangs. They were footsteps, and they disturbed the emptiness of being. The sounds came from the floor section from where I had pried away the tiles. When I went to have a look, the bangs stopped. One much louder bang followed, then another one.

Behind me, my stone hut had crumbled to the floor. My work had been for nothing, and I knew I didn't have the energy to rebuild it. In the middle of the floor's black section, I noticed a faint spot as if something or someone was attempting to shine a light through it from below.

Carefully, I stepped onto the blackness and made my way to the bright spot. I stood right before it, kneeled down, and fell forward to bring my face closer to the blackness and have a look at what might be below. Then our eyes met. That thing below me was my mirror image, stuck in a frozen state. I was looking at myself. My soul had come looking for me to save his self from the emptiness of being!

I tried to communicate with it, but my soul didn't move. I ran back to my igloo to grab a tile. I held it over my head and smashed it onto the blackness. The nothingness cracked. I tried it again. My second attempt sent a shockwave through the emptiness, pushing tiles upward. The crack's main vein sped toward the base of the world tree.

I tried it one more time. This time, the tile hit the spot, below which my soul was waiting for me. The black floor burst into a million pieces. I felt afloat. The emptiness around me began to disintegrate. The Soviet square disappeared. The crack from my second attempt had reached the world tree. I had felled it, and it was falling toward me. It wasn't the sound of wood breaking that I heard. It was the sound of reality tearing apart.

Without warning, my soul and my self merged. Together, we formed an explosive fire that filled the emptiness with flames. Our heat incinerated the dying world tree. We, too, ceased to be. In the end, all that was left of us was me. I could no longer see. I couldn't move my mouth to scream. Everything around me was dark. I wasn't breathing.

My thoughts and memories were still there.

I wished to see a night sky like the one I had seen in Iceland. A large number of infinitesimal dots of light appeared before my eyes, infinitely far away. I imagined the dots were stars. I could not recognize patterns in the stars. I hadn't imagined any constellations yet. Moving toward the stars at high speeds, I realized they weren't stars but galaxies.

The galaxy I was floating toward at an unimaginable speed was our Milky Way. Its spiraling arms beat around the universe like a small fish flapping its fins to make a series of turns. I saw our galaxy twist around its axis twelve or thirteen times.

My time slowed down to human proportions. The Milky Way settled. It absorbed me, and I absorbed it. I fell into the galaxy, and it fell back into me. I longed to see the world I knew best. Granting me my wish, the universe tilted to obey my will. Floating to our galaxy's perimeter, I could make out our solar system, our Sun, our Earth, the Moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt.

My drowsy eyes sobered up. I felt I was awakening to myself. My stomach turned. Something was pulling on my back. I wasn't gravitating toward something, I was accelerating toward it. I had turned into a ball of fire heading straight for Mars. I couldn't brace myself. My arms and legs evaporated before me. My back pointed toward the designated point of impact.

Faster! Faster! I almost lost my mind. The Martian surface plucked me from its skies. Impact! The unbearable pain of the blow forced me to flee into my consciousness. I lay at the bottom of a gigantic crater. It was me—I had done it. I had been the formative event that created Olympus Mons, the planet's biggest crater. Staring directly at the Sun, the light blinded me. I couldn't see the stars anymore.

I woke up.

— "Hello? Hello?" a man stood shouting outside my tent.

He yanked on one of my tent lines to try to wake me up and get me to respond.

— "Yes, hello?" I asked.

— "Hello! Have you paid your dues yet?"

My dues! I had forgotten all about paying my dues. If my hitchhike around the lake hadn't brought me back here, I would have left without paying.

— "Ah, yes. I will make sure to pay for both nights in the morning before I leave. Is that O.K.?" I said.

— "Don't forget," he said as he walked away.

Wide awake, I tried to unzip my sleeping back, but the zipper got stuck. I wrestled with myself to get into a position where I could use my hands to investigate the problem. It was almost impossible for me to turn myself around in this tight bag. Only my head stuck out through the opening. I had tightened it with the ties around it to preserve the warmth. I managed to stick a hand through the opening, but it did not stretch enough to free myself.

Panic overwhelmed me. I was stuck. I couldn't get out of my difficult position. My life flashed before my eyes. Of all the possible ways I could have died, I thought I was going to die of starvation, trapped in a straightjacket made of down. I could have died a heroic death. Struggling like a butterfly trying to escape its cocoon, all I could do was tremble.

Adrenaline shot through my body. If I wished to escape, I would have to calm myself down, but I couldn't. I tried getting angry instead. Grunting and cursing at myself, I had never felt so scared. I preferred being eaten alive by a bear to slowly dying from strangulation by a sleeping bag.

With my eyes closed, I could see better what I was doing. I was struggling with my self. I had found my self, and I did not like who I had found. I started crying. At first, I cried without making a sound. I could feel my warm tears flow across my face, and I enjoyed the warmth. Then I cried like a baby. Had my life been worth living? Had I been of use to the world, as a man and as an accountant? Would I be of better use as an artist? Did it matter?

In my present condition, I was of no use to myself. Cold sweat covered my warming body. I went looking for a calm place in my head. I imagined myself back at the fjord with Sandra sound asleep in my arms. I had felt so confident, so manly. Now, I was just a worm. I wished I could be that sexual strongman every day. Why did I have to be so unstable? That's the part I really didn't like about myself.

I remembered I had left a pocketknife in the pouch of my tent. I could reach for with one hand through the sleeping bag's opening near my head and grab it. With the knife, I cut the cord around my neck that was keeping me trapped. Within seconds, I freed myself by unrolling the bag down my torso.

Few people will ever believe it, but that night, I slew a dragon.

I was sitting upright in my tent, feeling relieved, quietly listening to the wind blow over the volcanic lake. I put my arms around myself. For the first time since I had been born, I told myself, "I don't have to become an artist if I don't want to. It's O.K. to be an accountant."

Three hours it took for my nerves to calm down before I won back the courage to face the world outside of my tent. I would return to the world of men neither as a victor nor as a coward. I would return as me, as the man I really was, had always been, and finally had become. On my hands and knees, I crawled out of my tent.

— "Are you alright?" Sandra asked.

She noticed I had been upset. I didn't know where I was. I was disoriented. I felt completely exhausted from an emotional rollercoaster. I rested on the floor of a small room. The walls were covered with the pastel colors of the paint I had splashed in every direction.

— "I think so," I said, trying to hide the fact that I felt reborn.

— "Well, did you find yourself?"

— "Yes," I said with a stern look on my face. "I have become my self."

I pointed at the walls, the cave of my psyche. Circularly, it showed the creation of the whole universe from the stars to the Milky Way, to Mars, the Moon, and our Earth, followed by their destruction and their rebirth. Finally, I had created my masterpiece, dubbed the Eternal Return, depicting a universe giving birth to itself, over and over again.

— "Do you see now?" I said. "It was me. It was always me, all along. I dreamed it all up, and then I made it real. Do you believe me now?"

Sandra squatted next to me on the floor, put her hand on my shoulder, and comforted me. She didn't even look at the paintings on the walls.

— "Sandra, I'm leaving you," I said.

— Looking confused, she asked," What do you mean?"

— "I'm not who you think I am."

— "I know. You've found your self."

— "I'm a fraud, Sandra," I said. "I want to move back to the city. I want to be an accountant again. I'm not an artist. I'm just an ordinary man who pretends to be creative. As an artist, people ask me where I get my inspiration from, but it comes naturally to me. It's effortless work, and yet, the galleries praise my creations as if I'm a genius. I don't want to fool myself anymore. I'm quitting the art business."

Sandra gave me a hug.

— Speaking softly into her ear, I said, "At least, as an accountant, everyone knows I'm a fraud, but I can still be very creative."
About the Author

Mathijs Koenraadt (1980) writes about individuals' struggles with the collectives trying to assimilate them.

Publications

Behold the Wanderer: A Novel against Modernity (2018)

If Not Now, When? Writings in Defense of Europe (2018)

Revival of the West: Securing a Future for European People (2017)

The Ignorant God: Thoughts about Time and Eternity (2017)

Return to Freedom: A Traveler's Thoughts on Life, Love and the Fate of the World (2015)

A Teenage Philosophy of Awareness and Existence: Analysis of the Columine Shooters' Worldview (2014)
