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inhabited during those first years of marriage.
    When Siri said, “I think you’re depressed,” it wasn’t out of concern, it was more of an accusation, her voice demonstratively weary, telling him
Oh, I am so tired of you and all your crap
.
    On a threadbare blanket on the threadbare couch lay Jon’s dog, with his relish for the inner organs of beasts and fowls, hence his name, Leopold, after Leopold Bloom; regular dog food was out of the question, he’d rather starve than eat regular dog food. He was a big, black Lab mix with a white patch on his chest and a doleful look in his eyes. Leopold knew that Jon was never going to finish his book and this worried him.The reason that this worried him—he was, after all, a dog and not a particularly pensive dog—was that Jon had stopped taking him for long walks. Jon was incapable of doing
anything
until the book was finished—apart, of course, from
not
writing,
not
beginning, and
not
finishing,
    What Jon Dreyer said to himself and also to Leopold was that once the summer was over and the book was finished, everything would return to normal and then they would go for long walks. It was still possible to finish it this summer. It was only the end of June. If he wrote ten pages a day, he would have sixty new pages every week—he’d take Sundays off and spend quality time with his children—which meant that he would have about three hundred pages by the end of August. Three hundred pages was a book. It had worked before, it could work again. Ten pages a day starting tomorrow. So day after day Jon sat at his laptop intending to write, either that or he lay on the floor next to his dog and tried to sleep, or he gazed out the window, or he read newspapers online and wrote text messages to women who might or might not reply, and after a lot of all that he ate peanuts and drank beer.
    Jon had a way of resorting to attic rooms. There was the attic study at Jenny’s house, where he was now, with the window facing the meadow, and then there was the attic at his and Siri’s home in Oslo, the extortionately expensive and drafty house on which they had a mortgage of more than eighty percent. Why the bank still trusted Siri and him and kept raising their credit limit was a mystery to him.
    Jon leaned over the keys and typed:
    10 × 6 is 60
    60 × 5 is 300
    300 is a book
    Sometimes he spent the night in the attic room. In Oslo the attic was even more drafty than the rest of the house, but at least he could get some peace. Lie underneath the sloping walls and pointed roof and drink. Play his guitar. Google stuff. Send and receive text messages, which he promptly deleted. It’s hard to say when Jon and Siri had started sleeping apart. It wasn’t something he wanted and it wasn’t something she wanted, it wasn’t a permanent solution and it wasn’t as if they slept apart every night either. And this summer they had even made love once or twice. He liked to run his hand over the sharp indent of her waist (which was so sharp because of her asymmetric back), he liked to run his finger down the nape of her slender neck.
    Jon stood up and stretched a little. Leopold followed him with his eyes.
    Walk time now?
    Leopold let out a sigh.
    No, apparently not, he’s sitting down again
.
    Everyone except the dog was confident that Jon was going to finish the book, which was why he had been granted an additional advance of 200,000 kroner from his publisher. Yes, parts one and two of the trilogy had sold like hotcakes. That was what they had said, that was what they had written in the papers. But it was a while now since anyone had said or writtenanything about Jon’s books, and the money had all been spent. Besides: Jon would never have used the expression “sell like hotcakes”—not only was it a cliché, it was also inaccurate. Hotcakes no longer sold like hotcakes. He had no statistics to back this up, but he was pretty sure that hotcakes fared poorly compared to smartphones or drafty