Free Borderliners by Peter Høeg

after it happened it was enough to drive you insane.
Sometimes, the way you felt, you wished you could go insane.
    But that is not how it works, you cannot just go crazy.
And then, when you
have been selected to be average, or a bit below, you have to do something else in order
to keep going. You have to develop a strategy.
    I suppose that is why I have turned upon the part about
the assessments.
    If no code of practice exists for determining when something is good or bad, why do people talk as
though it does? How could they be so sure when they awarded stars and points and wrote notes
in the record and decided who was gifted in mathematics or art and referred
Humlum to the Central Mission Home for the Retarded on Gersons Road, and committed me,
for an indefinite period, to Him melbjerg House because the fact that I was of average
intelligence

amounted to exacerbating
circumstances? If there is no code of practice, why is everyone so very, very
sure?
    Katarina came close to an explanation.
    That first time, at the clinic,
she only mentioned the bit about the stars
and time. But that was enough. For me, in a way, that has continued to be enough—for all of my life up to
this point.
    How could she know that they had never been able to
prove that one thing
is better than another?
    She had probably not worked it out logically. Actually, I would have to
say I believe that I gave more thought to it than she did. The greater the fear, the more thinking you do . Yet she came closer to the truth than anyone else.
    Maybe that is how it works—that whatever is closest to
the truth you do not
think about; you cannot reach it by achievement; you can only feel it. And feeling is
something you can do, even when you are
only sixteen.
    While she was
talking about his drawings he had stood up.
    "I knew there
was a conspiracy," he said.
    I set him back on
the chair.
    "We have to
get back soon," I said. "We've gone to the toilet."
    He did not hear
me.
    "What about
you, girl," he said. "Where do you fit into this?"
    I
knew what he meant. That she was, after all, one of the well-to-do kids—she
could not have problems. So what was in this for her? That was what he meant.
    But
she understood. That she had to give him something in re turn, if she wanted him to join us.
    "You have this idea that it must be terrible when people hang themselves," she said, "that they fall a
long way. But it doesn't have to be
like that."

She spoke as though we knew what all this was about,
and as though August knew the bit about her
mother, too. She said that, with her
father, on the surface things had been quiet and calm. After her
mother's death it was as though he began to dread the daylight, if you could imagine such a thing. Often he did
not get up, and when he did, he would
just sit there waiting for the day to pass. Often he would sit and stare
at a clock. As if trying to make the seconds pass more quickly. In the end he
had gone off to their farmhouse in
Sweden—where they used to go every summer—and there he hung himself, in the living room.
    "From a door handle," she said. "You don't
have to do it from high
up. He put a rope around his neck and then he sat down and put a bit of weight on the rope so that it tightened
and stopped his circulation. Then he lost consciousness and all his weight
pulled down on it, and he was dead.
    "Once it's happened,"
she said, "you're left with it, so you have to do something."
    "So why this
thing about a laboratory?" asked August.
    She started to sing. Just one verse. At first you thought she was going crazy.
The words were familiar, we had sung them often at assembly, but this time they
sounded different.
    ". . . To the Christ Child's crib my heart is ever brought, There I can gather the sum of all
my thoughts."
    She was in the choir, but even so it was incredible that she sang alone.
    "That
was where I got the idea," she said. "You have to have a place where you can gather your thoughts. Like
people who pray. That is