“Only nerds have tanks,” Hanne said, bluntly. “You don’t live with snakes and scorpions!” she scoffed. “I don’t share my home with the parasites I work with, do I?”
Søren glanced around the austere apartment and suddenly he couldn’t decide which was worse: bugs or loneliness?
“And every time I was confronted with that side of my son, I felt guilty. I desperately wanted him to have friends. Other young men he could go out with, run a half-marathon with, whatever, what do I know? And I wanted him to have a girlfriend. Live with her, so I could visit them on Sundays, and he could start a family one day. But if he managed to persuade a girl to come home with him, she would surely leave the moment she saw all his bugs and reptiles. At the time, I knew he kept a small nonpoisonous snake, four bird spiders, and some mysterious-looking, over-dimensioned stick insects. I made no attempt to disguise my disgust, but Asger merely laughed and said that was why children left home. I stopped bringing it up; we met mostly in my apartment and that’s why so much time had passed.
“He was delighted to see me. He was wearing his dressing gown over his pajamas, his hair was tousled, and he was grinning from ear to ear. Everything was fine. I entered the hall and took off my coat. The air was stuffy, but that was understandable. He had been ill for three or four days. It was also a little dark, but I presumed he had just been asleep.
“Asger took my coat, put it on a hanger, and opened a built-in closet to put it away, when something fell out and hit his head. It was a bundle held together with string, and it appeared to contain clothing and shoes. Asger asked me to hold the hanger while he struggled to push the bundle back in the cupboard. When he managed to close it, he hung my jacket on a door handle instead and went to the kitchen to put the kettle on. I stayed in the hall and called out to ask him why it was so dark, but the water was running and if he replied, I didn’t hear him. I switched on the hall light, and as the door to his bedroom was wide open, I entered and turned on the light.
“It took five seconds before I realized what I was looking at. He had three tanks. I was almost relieved, three isn’t excessive and, at first glance, they appeared to be empty. Then the shock came: there were bundles of clothes everywhere. The first bundle had merely seemed strange, but this obsession with bundles worried me.” Professor Moritzen looked hesitantly at Søren. He forgot to drink his tea. “His comforter, his pillow, and sheets were rolled into a bundle on his bed, and the bundle was held together with,” she gulped, “the cord from my dressing gown I had been looking for for ages. Along the wall facing the street were another three bundles, one with books, two apparently stuffed with Asger’s clothes—one was slightly open and over the buckle of a belt I could see the pair of expensive Fjällräven trousers I had given him for Christmas. Shoved under the bed was a bundle with what looked like a bathroom scale I had given him, and on a small desk in the corner, to the right of the window, was a bundle that appeared to contain an open laptop and next to it, smaller bundles. I was staring at them when I suddenly became convinced there was someone behind me. I could hear Asger whistle in the kitchen, hear cups clattering, so I knew it wasn’t him. I spun around and, on the wall in front of me, Asger had mounted three shelves, as wide as floorboards, and they were filled with jars of insects in ethanol, small tanks with live bugs, Styrofoam sheets with skewered insects and butterflies, and numerous reference books on the anatomy and physiology of insects.
“I left the bedroom and went into the living room, which was pitch black. I sensed the window must be covered with a heavy curtain, and I hoped desperately it was because he had been napping. I yanked the curtain open, but the room stayed dark. That was when it dawned on me that the room was alive: Asger had transformed his living room into a terrarium.
“‘I painted the window black recently,’ he casually told me when he returned with the tea. ‘The plumber came and he opened the curtains though I had expressly told him not to. My South Chilean tarantula was about to lay her eggs, and she can’t tolerate daylight when she does that. Not at all. In their natural habitat, the female buries herself in the ground so the eggs are exposed only to moisture, cold, and darkness. That plumber ruined it.’ He was angry. ‘I haven’t been able to make her lay eggs since.’ He put the teapot and the cakes on a coffee table that I could only just detect the outlines of.
“‘But I can switch on the light, if you want me to,’ he said, and before I had time to reply he flicked the switch. He explained it was a special light that filtered out all the red beams. You can’t read in it, but you can find your way around. He asked me if it was all right or whether I would rather sit in the kitchen.