Borderliners by Peter Høeg

the
building had been repaired at the same time as the rose bed and the renovations.
    Also at that juncture, they had installed double
glazing, but only the
standard windows, with a lever that did not lock, just closed them. I opened it with the coat
hanger.
    I sat for a moment on the window, feeling my way. Three
people breathing.
    Beneath the window slept the girl with whom she shared
the room. She was
familiar, she was one of the diplomatic children whose father was an ambassador and away
somewhere. In the dark, Katarina was asleep. Behind her breathing there was another's.
    It was Flakkedam's—deep, quite peaceful, and penetrating.
He had to be in the
next room, just on the other side of the wall.
    I pulled the window to, but without closing it with the
lever. Then I
climbed across the diplomatic girl and made my way over to Katarina.
    I stood by her
bedside for a moment.
    Sometimes, at H ø ve, at the vacation home for underprivileged children, you crept into the
girls' dormitory at night, and stood alone in the dark, and felt their presence.
    But
there had been eighty girls there. That had been almost too much. This was
different.
    I stretched out an arm and shook her gently. She woke up.
As she drew breath to scream I put a hand over her mouth and cut off the sound. "It's me," I said. She sat up, but I did not let go
of her until she settled down.
    "I've come
about August," I said.
    It was necessary to whisper, very softly, lips right up
against her ear. She
did not pull away.
    "There's a plan behind the school," I said,
"August won't be able to cope with it. The idea is that time raises up."
    Until that moment I had held
this back from everyone else, even from her. Now I had to trust.

"If
you became blind," I said, "if you were used to finding your way around a house and then, suddenly, one day had
an accident —was attacked or
something—and became blind, only then would you actually notice the
furniture. It would always have been there, but
you would never have been aware of it, you would just have gone around it. Only when something becomes hard to
cope with do you see it. That's how you become aware of time—when it becomes
hard to cope with."
    Her hair was in the way. I brushed it back and sat holding
it for a moment, so it would not fall
back. I was resting against the place in the bed where she had been lying. It
was still warm. I knew what I wanted to say,
I had gone over it in my head beforehand.
    "If you can manage to stay on at the school—if you
have com mitted no
serious violations or acts of gross negligence—then you're here for ten years. During those
ten years your time will be strictly regulated, there will be very few occasions when you are
in doubt as to
where you should be or what you should be doing, very few hours altogether where you have
to decide anything for yourself. The rest
of the time will be strictly regulated. The bell rings—you go up to the classroom; it rings—you come down; it
rings—you eat; rings—work;
rings—eat; rings—study period; rings—three free hours; rings—bedtime. It's as if there are these very narrow tunnels
that have been laid out and you walk along them and nowhere else. They're invisible, like glass that has just been
polished. You don't see it if you
don't fly into it. But if you become blind or nearsighted, then you have to try to understand the system.
I've been trying for a long time. Now
I know."
    The other girl felt so close,
Flakkedam was just on the other side, their breathing was right beside us
the whole time. We were talking in a little space between the breathing of two people or,
in fact, three, because somewhere beneath
us August lay, breathing rest lessly. You
could not hear it, but even so, to me he was there anyway.
    She drew the quilt over our heads,
to muffle our voices. There we sat, as though in a tent or a sleeping bag. I did not let on. I kept going so that she
would understand me.

"There is a selection that
takes place.