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houses in overpriced areas (like his own, for example) or antiaging creams. What a strange word,
antiage
. Jon typed it on his computer.
    Antithis. Antithat. Antiage
.
    The point of an antiaging cream was that women and men who buy it and apply it to their faces will look younger. Feel younger. Be younger. Turn the clock back. Stop aging and start antiaging.
Antitime. Antihunger. Antianxiety
(that was already a word!).
Antideath
.
    He remembered that much against his will, he had gone to a mall outside of Oslo with Siri to buy Christmas presents, and, that done, she had said that she had to stop by the cosmetics department to buy moisturizer.
    “Feel how dry my skin is,” she’d said, and she had taken his hand and run it over her cheek.
    Antidry. Antidrought
.
    The woman behind the cosmetics counter, clad in a white coatdress, like a kind of trailblazing scientist, spoke softly and confidentially about the state of things in general. A demigoddess for our times, Jon thought. In his fifty years on this earth, he had witnessed and even participated in one or two political revivals and ideas about how to run the world and he could not help but admire her. The white skin, the white dress, the white voice, never uttering a word about fear, she talked onlyabout beauty. And Siri, his clever, cool, critical, hot-tempered Siri, with her gracefully asymmetric back and dry cheeks, listened raptly and wound up paying 1,750 kroner of the million that the bank had just paid into their joint account with their drafty house as security,
antidebt
, for a cream containing peptides, retinol, EGF (discovered, according to the white-clad demigoddess, by a Nobel Prize winner), collagen, and AHA.
    Leopold looked at his master:
Walk time now?
    The final part of his trilogy was to be about time. Jon planned to write a hymn to everything that endures and everything that falls apart. But truth be told he wasn’t sure what he actually meant by “everything that endures and everything that falls apart” or how he was supposed to write about it, but no one argued with him, except the dog who was stretched out on the floor with his leash between his teeth, waiting, and reminding him that one human year is equal to seven dog years and how is that for a thought on the nature of time?
Just think how many years it’s been since I had a proper walk, I’m a humble dog, born with big muscles and long limbs and I need to get out and run, I have no other wish
.
    For a while Jon toyed with the idea of picking up where Walter Benjamin’s
Arcades Project
had left off. This would be something quite different, of course, Jon was writing a novel and not a massive, impenetrable work on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris (Walter Benjamin had been somewhat disdainful of fiction). But something that took its outset in shopping malls, the arcades of our own day, a depiction not merely of the people, of white-frocked womenwith their gospel on how to turn back time, but of the things themselves.
    Jon sighed and looked over his notes.
    Siri was a chef. Siri cooked real food for real people. Not pretentious pap. People ate her food and were happy. And here he sat, year in, year out, writing a novel that might or might not have to do with a mall. Or with time. Leopold raised his big head and looked at him.
    Jon had fooled everyone. The cover art was ready, the catalog blurb was written, he had agreed to do a reading from the book at his publisher’s press conference at the end of August. And he had nothing.
    Not “nothing” as a modest man might say about something, but quite literally nothing. Not a word.
    Jon took a swig of beer and looked out the window. His girls were playing in the meadow. Alma and Liv. Alma black-haired and dark-eyed. Liv fair-haired and finespun. They were picking flowers and dancing about in the sunshine with the girl who Siri had hired to look after them. The girl called Milla. He had barely said hello to her the previous evening, after