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	The great Russian brain researcher A.R.Luria conducted a 30-year study of a disturbingly prophetic character, whom he called simply S. Luria described S. flawlessly reciting dozens of pages of text filled with everything from a narrative story to a foreign language he did not speak, complex scientific terms, or even nonsense syllables. His memory was also spatial ­ he could remember the positions of the individual elements on a page or blackboard in any order presented, and did so even when asked to repeat them years after the original tests. When he was a child, his imagery of school was so real that he sometimes forgot to get out of bed and get ready to go. A characteristic of S`s inner world that greatly impressed Luria was his effortless ability at synaesthtesia, a fact that Luria realized was precisely the reason that he was able to perform such amazing feats of recall. S. described his procession of thoughts: ²I heard a bell ringing. A small round object rolled right before my eyesŠ my fingers sensed something like ropeŠ. Then I experienced a taste of salt waterŠ and something white.² Gradually it became impossible for S to function: ³I always experience sensations like these. When I ride in a trolley I can feel the clanging it makes in my teeth. So one time I went to buy some ice cream, thinking I'd sit there and eat it and not have this clanging. I walked over to the vendor and asked her what kind of ice cream she had. 'Fruit ice cream', she said. But she answered in such a tone that a whole pile of coals, of black cinders, came bursting out of her mouth, and I couldn't bring myself to buy an ice cream after she'd answered that wayŠ. Another thingŠ if I read when I eat, I have a hard time understanding what I'm reading ­ the taste of food drowns out the sense.² As he grew older, S´s inability to forget began seriously to affect his life, and he eventually quit his job and began a life of exhibiting him self as a public attraction. Luria commented on the difficulty of compiling a final report on his subject, since during the sessions images would come into S´s mind that constantly slipped him out of control and he would begin to ³operate automatically,² becoming verbose, his mind cluttered with detail and irrelevances as he digressed endlessly. S. lived with an image stream that he could not turn off. Out of his possession of a super-human indelible memory he developed an overwhelming, disturbing sense of everything being temporary. It is hard beginning looking over ones shoulder again, the way I left Gry, the feeling of desperation and hopelessness which led to my escape. Maybe a psychologist could have helped me and made me understand the uselessness in my escape. I can't remember what I thought I would find, I don't think I thought further than to the away. I never gave much consideration in what I had; almost a family, a decent education, soon; a respectable wardrobe, and a brilliant future in a hierarchy built for climbing. I am starting to remember my changes now. There was a time when I stopped recognising those around me, while the unknown sounds gained a feeling of something familiar. Like the day I arrived at work and the accountant awaited me in my office. He had such a pale face. It suddenly seemed so beautiful. He took my hand and I kept it for too long; studying the rings around his eyes, the heavy bags in his cheeks, and the way his eyes moved from my left to my right eye, like he was inquiring, or searching for contact with someone whom never come back. I took the papers he offered me, and left him for the roof-terrace. I can't remember whether the papers ever got to my desk, or if they followed the wind north from there. I have been travelling in places of which you have never heard, looking for books and evidence, which have never existed. I have been lost and found my way out, searching in labyrinths which complexity would overwhelm the human consciousness. But I have still not found the reasons why I went there.Soon someone will find me, someone who can tell me where I am going, or what I am seeking. If I am lucky, it is someone coming to continue my Quest in my place. I am longing for the day I can rest, recording my diaries while waiting. At the end of my relationship with Gry, I wasn't very open. I sometimes drove off in the middle of the night without telling her where I went. I tried so hard to organise my own mind that I didn't even notice hers. If you talk to Gry, she will probably tell you a hundred other stories about how I let her down; I have forgotten all but my decision to leave. She might have been sad when I left without a word, but it must also have been a release after being treated like that for months. The adventure does not exist; it is in continuous, self-retaining progression. I don't think you are able too find neither that nor me. This will be the last tape you will receive. I am unobtainable, I am the adventure, I am as physical as your wet dreams. You must never go out searching for me. I am more valuable for you that wayŠ Tor went to Hollywood where he started working in the porno-industry. I have seen all of his movies; he has fucked everyone worth fucking in the industry. Of course, he looks different now, he has done his share of plastic surgery, and he has changed his name. But I have watched his carrier closely and I know who he is. He started as a part-model; he has an enormous dick. It was in the ³big boobs² ­series I understood who he was, he worked in nine of the productions, with larger parts for every follower-up, until he was the main male character. ³Big boobs² took totally off when he started acting in them and now they are among the best selling series in the history of porn. Tor was amazing when he got started, he could satisfy a harem without breaking sweat. One of my favourites is ³black butts², and especially the orgy-scene at the end where he was the only white person in a dark room full of naked people, he didn't ask what sex they where before he got to the next hole, he wiped the place clean like a white tornado. Markussen has passed away. Markussen has moved to the west-coast where he works at an aluminium-plant. Markussen is married, has three kids and a cabin in the mountain. Markussen drinks too much. Markussen has moved to his wives hometown. Markussen is divorced. Markussen failed his exams. Markussen became a pilot, and he is now flying cocaine in the Caribbean's. Markussen will never come home. Markussen will never move again. Markussen is searching for the meaning of life. Markussen misses his kids. Markussen has got himself a dog. Markussen has fallen asleep. Where is Markussen now. Markussen has come home. Markussen is moving to his hometown. Markussen comes from up north. Markussen travels south. Markussen's mistress does not like his dog. Markussen's kids don't like his mistress. Markussen's mother thinks he should marry again. Markussen's father thinks his mistress is gorgeous. Markussen's dog barks a lot. It probably doesn't like living in such a small flat. Markussen want's to get a new job. Has Markussen woken up from the dead. I think Markussen would have moved to Spain if he only knew how to speak Spanish. A happy past which makes me joyful to remember, without a here and now which can make me smile or inspire, a dream of a future which is different from today, or a past which is different from this ­ here I lay my life at rest, this conscious ghost from a paradise where I never have been, this carcass born from a hope of what is to come. I met Tor Markussen in Berlin, he was the most present person I have ever met. He has seen all that is to see, he has been travelling in Tlön, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius, he has loved what's worth loving and never owned a thing. He has taken control over his life and made an understanding that there are no limits. He will never go back to what he had. Not because of a lack of love, but because those rules don't apply for him anymore. This is not religion, it's something beyond, he operates on so many levels and with such a precision that my reality is probably just one of many choices for him. He exists only because it is a possibility. When I left Paris I already knew that I would not be able to move outside the circles I was destined for. No more than an imaginary trip anyway. I always knew that I would grow old here, with the adventures and some kind of essence growing in my own head; just to prolong my longing for where ever I never will reach, to pull myself deeper into the hopelessness of not being able to satisfy even my own desires. I can sit in my armchair, looking at the apple-trees, which should have been pruned before the snow arrived, the snow on the path and the sky above which again reminds me of experiences and desires never to be satisfied. I sink back in fables of adventures I have experienced and the chances I blew. I put on my hat and coat and ignore the fact that I am wading to my knees in snow. When I reach the beach I find that I can no longer feel my feet, and decide to go back. I can see across all the continents from my armchair, I can see what really was and what I made into obstacles on my path. There are always someone watching ones steps, making it difficult to stick to the path of ones desires. And making it difficult to see which desires are ones own and which are enchantments from the popular culture. What film made you believe in the awaiting beach, and from where comes the haunting pictures of sticky days on a colonial veranda were there is nothing to do but the fight to keep up with your body's loss of fluids in a too hot linen suit smelling of old sweat and gin, the house giving in for the jungle since there are no more slaves to keep it away. The furniture falling apart from mould and cockroaches. Heroes in war-haunted hotels inhabited by western and Asian ­ decadent - corrupt journalists and diplomats passing away time, bathing in alcohol and adultery. Sinners and murderers in attics and basements, with conspiracies, pistols and ideals. And the last plane which never take you all the way home, but leaves you in another sin-pit, not quite as bad as the last one. That is where I want to go. I had a vision of my future; there was a respectable wardrobe, a large modern house, a beautiful wife, younger mistresses, and ambitious kids. I was to have a demanding, but interesting job with regular work-hours and holidays; which would be spent at the summerhouse in Almeria. Then I was given an offer to leave everything behind, and depart with a train from Gare du Nord to start all over again. In Rebar there was a man whom was always sitting by the chess-tables, waiting for someone for a game. He sat there every day, in the sun, and seldom did anyone sit down to play. That did not seem to worry him. He was studying the shadows from the papaya-trees, never leaving until the sun set. The days when cool winds from the ocean arrived, I usually sat down for a game. We seldom looked at each other and never spoke during the game. If we for some reason did not finish, he would remember the arrangement of the pieces until I wanted to continue. When we were arranging the board for another game he would often tell about when he was a musician. He was highly regarded and rewarded by his listeners. He had apprentices coming from all over, but he wanted control over the elements in silence and noise and started studying to create a universal system, which was supposed to explain all the possible variations, and possibilities from which music was to be created. After years and years over he had perfected a system, which included all that, his ears were able to perceive, and started composing new music, which overwhelmed his audience. Shortly after he retired and started playing chess. He did not understand the tactics and won every time. I've disappeared several times. I don't know where, when, or for how long. All I know is that I could not tell. I have been travelling for a long time now, and I wont come back for a while. If ever. I don't even know what back is anymore. I don't know the names of the places I have been, and the people I have met are long forgotten. I have had strong connections to many of them, but I have always had to move on. After a while you learn how to forget. Someone is looking for me again. Soon there won't be anywhere left to hide. I think I will start to record a diary. I don't want to make it easy for you, I've always hoped that Gry would come looking for me. I would have been more receptive towards her. I still think of her, you can tell her that. I know she is not waiting for me anymore. Please don't play these tapes for her. The only reason for Tor to move was because he had legs. He did nothing but exist. He had neither a purpose or process, he couldn't be bothered. I think he was doing alright. When I met him, he was living in a bungalow that he had built on the beach. He usually sat in front of it until the big waves started breaking from south-west, and then he was surfing until dark. It was seldom he ate, and even more seldom he spoke, but he smiled a lot. Sometimes he took out a big black book and wrote some lines. The last day before he disappeared, he wrote all day. He gave me his surfboard and bungalow, and stole my car and guitar. A man who for a long time rides through desolate areas, is seized by the longing for a town. At last he reaches Isadora, a town with the reputation of making the finest binoculars and violins, where a man, when choosing between two women, always finds a third, where the cockfights ends up in bloody fights between the spectators. Of this he thinks when longing for a town. Isadora is the town of his dreams; with one difference. In the city of his dreams, he was young; when arriving in Isadora it is already late in his life. In the town-square there is a low wall, at which the old sits watching the youth passing by; he sits among them. His longings and desires are already memories. You are now entering the secret life of the believed to be lost Tor Markussen. The previously last records to be known of him was a trunk full of photographs and documents left in the attic of an apartment in which he was living until midsummer nineteen eighty-four, when he mysteriously disappeared on a vacation with his fiancé in Paris. The last thing she saw of him was brief smile in the window of a train leaving for Marseille. Those where his last known whereabouts, until the discovery of these tapes. They might not help us locating him, but maybe they will help us understand who he really was, and why he acted as he did. I started doing everything right sometime in the beginning of the eighties when no one expected that from me anymore. My family and my girlfriend where all very happy. I was not used to get such unanimous applause and became suspicious. I always thought Gry did not bother much about things like that, but I guess she only was more cunning and patient than my parents. When she started laughing at my proposals of alternatives to the ³right thing², I decided it was time to leave. I wouldn't have to make it such a drama, but I wanted to begin my adventures with a kick-start. I have been walking for two weeks, after a couple of days I had to buy new shoes, the old ones where gorgeous, but they weren't made for walking. I am looking forward to a rest, but I want you to suffer a little before you find me. I would like to tell a little about myself, I do not know if it will make any sense to you, but I'll do it anyway. We are getting to know each other better now. I guess you have been studying carefully whatever I left. You might find a lot there, maybe the answer to why I left and where I am, but you should not believe blindly what I tell, you should go to several sources to verify. You might already have understood that. I have never experienced an adventure. An adventure has a beginning and an end. When I entered that train in Paris, I started an adventure. It was still an adventure when I got of. I did not see the details clearly, but I could recognise the feeling from movies I had seen. I have experienced and made things happen. I have travelled around the world more than once, a year here, two years there, always on my way to something new, but also bringing something old. I travelled from Cabinda to New York with Armand from Paris, I moved from the flat I was sharing with Armand to Jessica down the road, still keeping in touch with Armand. Then I moved on with Jessica, loosing contact with Armand, before I ended up in bed with other strange bodies. I have never ended an adventure before it has changed so much of its character that it has already turned into another. When I started searching I discovered I was moving away from my dreams. I often stood in the stairway smoking, believing I was clearing my mind for another work-hour while dreaming of adventures and excitements yet to come. At some point I realised that my dreams where an escape from the realisation of my dreams, and I decided to leave. I can't remember the dreams anymore, but I can feel the consequences. That was twelve years ago, and I am still surprised of how easy it was. As I am speaking these words into my Dictaphone I am standing in a stairway smoking my Lucky Strikes while wondering where my dreams went. There are adventures to participate in, and women to seduce. I think I will have to go searching for them. In the beginning of my journeys, I only had to close my eyes, and my head started humming like a beehive: I saw faces, trees, houses, a Japanese women from Kamaishi bathing naked in a tub, a dead Russian, emptied through a large gaping wound, all his blood in a pound besides him. I evoked the taste of couscous, the smell of oil filling the streets of Burgos at suppertime, the smell of finkel floating in the streets of Tetuan, the whistling of the Greek goatherds; I was moved. It is a long time since that joy faded away. Will it ever awaken? Thus the beast lives unhistorically, for it gets up in the present like a number without any odd fraction left over; it does not know how to play a part, hides nothing, and appears in each moment exactly and entirely what it is. Thus a beast can be nothing other than honest. By contrast, the human being resists the large and ever increasing burden of the past, which pushes him down or bows him over. It makes his way difficult, like an invisible and dark burden which he can for appearances' sake even deny, and which he is only too happy to deny in his interactions with his peers, in order to awaken their envy. Thus, it moves him, as if he remembered a lost paradise, to see the grazing herd or, something more closely familiar, the child, which does not yet have a past to deny and plays in blissful blindness between the fences of the past and the future. Nonetheless this game must be upset for the child. He will be summoned all too soon out of his forgetfulness. For he learns to understand the expression "It was," that password with which struggle, suffering, and weariness come over human beings, so as to remind him what his existence basically is--a never completed past tense. If death finally brings the longed for forgetting, it nevertheless thereby destroys present existence and thus impresses its seal on the knowledge that existence is only an uninterrupted living in the past, something which exists for the purpose of self-denial, self-destruction, and self-contradiction. I met Tor in southern Asia, he was building himself some kind of financial and political empire. It seemed he was a total power-addict. I did not understand it in the beginning; he was very discrete. He understood what I wanted and helped me there, but only because it was to his advantage. He would never break anyone though. If he had some kind of disagreement with someone, he would help in such a way that they understood on what fragile basis they had built their lives. He could humiliate with the friendliest of gestures. I don't want to run anymore, I am looking forward to be found, but the fear I've built up; from years of cover ­stories and more or less well planned escapes; like this, like the one in Paris. I started to struggle on my way to Gare du Nord, they had to carry me onboard the train. At that time things had gone too far for a retreat, there was no point in struggling. Why do we always fight against changes, while our whole life is based on changing ourselves. Since that I have spent much of my energy trying not to look back. I have heard noise too close. I am moving on tonight. This will be the last you hear from me. I can blame anyone. I can make a list. Lists are fun, personally I prefer the hate/love ­list. On my account it seems like the hate-list is growing as I loose my goals out of sight. The love-list on the contrary is slowly fading away. It might be the nuances or a refinement, but I guess it has to do with games you want to try and the games you already have grown sick of. I can't blame him for leaving. It was either that or giving in for the supremacy. His fiancé followed his every step and never gave him a break from his faults. From respect of his choice I have never revealed where he went, and now I don't know anymore. But I know it's not easier for him now. That might comfort his fiancé. He was really desperate when he left, he joined the French foreign legions and was sent to Chad to kill children. I met him down there and he was crying out his regrets, but he didn't dare to desert. He finished his five years and left for another part of the world. He only told me that he was going to change his name and start a bar somewhere warm, and far away. This is my testament; I have nothing and give it all to the one who tracks me down. There is nothing holding me back, I liberated myself from such the day I entered that train in Paris; Gry was the last person with any power to stop me, but she never took part in my frustrations, she wanted her hands and feet tied up. I would never do that to her, I would leave the knots too loose and close my eyes for too long, too often. The little freedom I wanted to give her, she would never return. That was all that I wanted, and all that I took. I know I can't hide forever, but I'll have to try. What you don't know is that I have a lot to loose. I have done things you are not allowed to watch on TV, I am wanted and sought after by forces that are stronger than you or I. And they are closer to find me. Now I am running again. I know you are far away, but it is better to be on the safe side. I am sending you some words about why I left, then you might leave me alone. One can always hope. You do know that I left my fiancé in Paris? I found it quite romantic to do it that way. I gave Gry an experience of Paris, stronger and larger than any romantic charter-tour would ever be able to. I know she saw me at Gare du Nord, I pretended not to see her, but she did not believe it for a second. She had grown familiar with my new ways. In the village were I am living there is a long street passing all the way through. It is coming from far away, but for me it starts in the outskirts of the village. If you walk all the way out there you will see nothing but cornfields. Just before the cornfields is the last building taller than three stories before the next village. That is where I live. I don't have any work to go to. Earlier I would have been reading, studying God knows what fascinating subject. Knowledge and my shoes are all about vanity. Every morning I put them on and walk through the village to the last building taller than three stories before the next village. On my way I salute the ones I meet; I know most of them, they respect me. I own two buildings taller than three stories, miles of cornfields; I have a beautiful wife, younger mistresses and good shoes. I guess I will have to leave soon.
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