My right hand was still sore, so instead I clumsily cut my left hand. The gash was deeper than I’d intended, and blood poured into the bathtub. Without further hesitation I thrust my hand into the blackness and closed my eyes.
When I got back to my house just under an hour later, I stood in the middle of the floor for a long time, trying to return to what we call reality. My skin was a porous borderline and parts of me evaporated into another world, infinitely distant yet only the blink of an eye away. I took off my clothes, got out a plastic jug and went into the toilet, where I poured cold water over my body, ignoring the fact that it splashed onto the floor. When I had rubbed myself dry and was beginning to drift back to my place in life, I sat down at the desk and opened my notepad at the page headed The Other Place.
*
Maybe it’s because of the larger amount of blood, but my body is different this time. Red smoke rises from my skin. Hooks protrude from my fingertips. I am a monster, a sexless creature with the ability to shapeshift. The magic has become physical. I think my arms long and they shoot out from my torso like tentacles, the hooks flashing through the air. It’s amazing. This is my real body, not the sack of innards I drag around in my everyday life. This is me.
The place is different too, or else I’m in another area. On the horizon a wall of darkness extends from the ground to the sky. The shadows of my neighbours are here, but their heads are at the same height as the darkness and blend into it.
A difference in the colour of the grass ten metres away catches my eye. I focus my energy in that direction, lift the object lying there and bring it towards me, allow it to hover a metre in front of my eyes.
If I had any doubts that this was the place I visited when I was twelve years old, those doubts disappear in an instant. In the air before me is Rebus, the toy dog. He is completely unchanged. He has been waiting for me for seven years.
In the ordinary world I might have experienced a sense of nostalgia, but here I am the monster, and all I feel is rage. Rebus is a reminder of my weakness. I lash out with a tentacle, ready to tear him to shreds.
The hooks pierce Rebus’s body and the shock of his scream makes me let go. It is not the howl of a dog but the scream of a child. That child, exactly the way he sounded when his bones broke. Rebus lies on the grass, staring at me with black eyes.
I turn away from him, drift away across the field, breathe in the red smoke from my skin and enjoy the moment to the full before I return.
*
It might seem peculiar that I simply accepted the life form that the field allocated to me. But you who are reading this—you are not me, and you don’t know me. You don’t know what images I carry within me. The entity that I came to refer to as my ‘field body’ corresponded to an unattainable self-image that I didn’t know I had. In later years I transformed various aspects of this self-image into characters in my stories: Eli, Teres, the Fisherman, Simon. Dilutions and echoes of the body I inhabited when I was on the field. The field showed me as I really was.
Know thyself has resounded as the battle cry of the thinking individual from ancient Greece through to Freud and beyond. It is every bit as unattainable as the exhortation listen to your heart. The heart is a muscle; its job is to pump blood around the body. It doesn’t say anything. Listening out for its advice is something you can do only metaphorically.
The same applies to self-knowledge. People are as incapable of knowing themselves as the heart is of speaking. At best we can say that we have certain gifts or talents, certain weaknesses and fears. This doesn’t mean that we know ourselves, or who we are, any more than could be expressed in a post on a dating website. We also have a tendency to lie, even to ourselves.
Back to the field.
The satisfaction of inhabiting a body and a state that felt utterly true is beyond description. To be able to transcend inwards and really be myself, regardless of my bodily form, was a presence and a pleasure I never thought possible, a happiness greater than anything I had previously regarded as happiness.
*
In spite of what I have written above, there was one thing that bothered me: the child’s voice. It came from a different place than the rest of my experience in the field, just like when someone speaks in the cinema and breaks the illusion on the screen. The same space, but a different reality. I didn’t want it there.
Elsa’s key was lying on the table. I put it in my pocket and went to return it at long last, and perhaps to get answers to some of my questions.
She looked worn out when she opened the door. All she said was ‘Oh, it’s you,’ then she shuffled back indoors without checking to see if I was following her. The formerly unified smell in the hallway had now splintered into traces of ginger biscuits, mulled wine, candles and perfume.
On my first visit Elsa had sat straight-backed like a queen; now she slumped so far down in her armchair that she appeared to be disappearing into the stuffing. I placed the key on the glass table and asked her how she was.
‘Christmas,’ she said. ‘That’s what’s wrong with me.’
‘Hard work?’
‘That doesn’t even begin to cover it.’
‘It looked wonderful.’
Elsa glared at me as if I had just described a torture scene as ‘tiptop’, and to be fair, I knew what she meant. If you have started to associate with the truth, then it becomes difficult to lie, and Christmas is, among many other things, the number one occasion for lying.
‘There’s a child,’ I said. ‘In the other place.’
‘Is that what you call it? The other place?’
‘Yes. What do you call it?’
‘Nothing. But I think of it as the refuge.’
‘Okay. There’s a child there. Do you know anything about that?’
With a huge sigh Elsa heaved herself up out of the chair and went over to the bay window, where the tarpaulin outside hid the view towards Tunnelgatan. She pointed towards Sveavägen.
‘I was standing here,’ she began. ‘One night just under a year ago. I couldn’t sleep. I’d been lying in bed worrying about my children.’ She snorted and pulled a face, as if she were recalling a transgression in the past. ‘The time was maybe one-thirty when an…equipage drove along Luntmakargatan and stopped by the tunnel.’
‘An equipage?’
‘I don’t know what else to call it. There was a silver-coloured Volkswagen. A bubble. And hooked onto the back of it was a caravan, also silver-coloured. “The egg”—are you familiar with it?’
I nodded. When I was little I’d had quite a few toy cars and caravans. One of them was the egg-shaped model that had been popular in the 1950s.
‘It was one of those,’ Elsa went on. ‘It stopped down below, by the entrance to the tunnel. The car door opened and a man unfolded himself. He was too big for that little car—almost two metres tall. He looked around, but I knew he couldn’t see me because I was standing in the shadows.’
I sat there holding my breath; my face must have given something away, because Elsa said, ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. Go on.’
She looked searchingly at me, then once again adopted her stance from almost a year ago, perhaps to jog her memory.
‘The man opened the door of the caravan and stepped in. My window was open a fraction, so I could hear music playing in the darkness.’
A cold hand reached up from my belly and nails scratched the inside of my throat when she told me she had recognised Jan Sparring’s voice singing ‘The Man Up There Must Like Me’. I didn’t bother correcting her, and she continued.
‘After a while he reappeared with a bundle in his arms. He walked quickly towards the tunnel, and I lost sight of him. After maybe thirty seconds he came back without the bundle, got in the car and drove off. I went down to the street and had a look, but there was nothing there. He must have left it in the tunnel.’
My throat felt sore from the scrabbling, tearing nails and I croaked, ‘Isn’t it locked at night?’
‘He might have had a key. Why do you sound so weird? Do you know something about this?’
‘Maybe. That bundle…what was it?’
Elsa flopped back into the armchair and pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger.
‘I didn’t call anyone,’ she said. ‘I didn’t report it. I didn’t want to get involved.’
‘What kind of bundle was it? Could it have been a child?’
‘I don’t know. Not a small child, anyway. But there was something about the way he carried it…I should have reported it, I know that. When the tunnel opened in the morning I went down and looked, but all I found were a few rags.’
‘Where?’
Elsa frowned. ‘I told you—in the tunnel.’
‘Where exactly in the tunnel?’
‘Twenty metres in, perhaps? Why do you ask?’
I didn’t want to go over the events with which I was familiar and my own role in them, so I dodged Elsa’s questions and made my excuses. I said I had a lot to do and wished her Merry Christmas, then hurried back to my house.
*
It must have been the child.
A year ago the child, who would then have been eleven years old, was left in the tunnel by the policeman. Was the child dead at that point, or was he still alive?
He was left where the busker played, and where I had made contact with the rock. Was that place already special beforehand, or did it become special because the child was left there?
Seven years ago the child said that he might have created the other place. The blackness in the child, the pull from the child, reminds me of whatever is in the shower room, and the thing in the shower room leads to the other place.
Where’s the connection? Is the child part of the rock? Is the rock part of the child? Oh my God.
And what about me?
If it really was the child, then our paths have crossed twice now. Is it a coincidence? X, marked.
I don’t understand.
And the ‘equipage’? The car, the caravan and ‘Somebody Up There Must Like Me’? The song the child crooned, the song the busker played.
I have to
*
I put down my pen and sat staring at the last three words as I stroked the cross etched into my right arm. What did I have to do?
If I had previously been detached from everything and everyone, I now felt more like a crossroads or a meeting place for people, events, and equipages. A rail yard where incomprehensible freight was unloaded from abstract carriages, and fresh cargo crammed in for transportation. What was it and where was it going? What did I know? I was only the place where it occurred.
Maybe I was exaggerating my own role in the proceedings, as I so often did. Maybe it was just a coincidence that I happened to be in Blackeberg and on Luntmakargatan when the child’s terrible story unfolded. To be precise, I hadn’t even been living on Luntmakargatan at the time; I had moved in later. When the pressure began to get stronger.
I remembered how I had felt when I saw this house for the first time. In spite of the cramped proportions and the seedy atmosphere, the betting slips and the smell of smoke, something had clicked. This is where I’m going to be. The memory reminded me of something I had written earlier, and I flicked back through my notepad.
Perhaps the most important decisions in our lives are made without the assistance of our intelligence. There is good reason to suspect that this is the case. So is it possible to talk about something that resembles the concept of fate? Maybe it is.
It was well expressed, and I felt like Rabbit in Winnie the Pooh. He is praised by Pooh for his cleverness and fantastic brain. It is probably thanks to these very qualities that Rabbit never understands anything.
I knew so much, but understood nothing.
*
There was a knock on the door at quarter to six, and I shot up from my chair where I had been dozing. Fucking hell! For a few seconds I was completely disorientated. I knew who was knocking and why, but I didn’t know how I felt about that. I took an internal sounding and discovered that the decision had already been made, with or without the assistance of my intelligence, so I went and opened the door.
‘Nice jumper,’ Thomas said, and walked in without waiting for an invitation.
I was still wearing the blue jumper my mother had given me for Christmas, but didn’t want to share that particular piece of information. Thomas was carrying a black rucksack, and he was dressed in black jeans and a black jacket. He pushed his hands deep in his pockets as he looked around and said, ‘So this is where you hide yourself away like a little Jew. Is that what you’re wearing?’
‘I’m not used to this kind of thing. Are you?’
‘You mean have I done it before?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think I’d tell you if I had?’
‘I thought you said you knew me?’
‘Exactly. Put on something dark.’
My heart sank as I rummaged around in the wardrobe, searching for the navy blue duffel coat I’d stopped wearing because it was too small and too shabby. What did it say about me if I was upset because a skinhead thought I was unreliable? Besides which, he was probably right. I didn’t even trust myself.
Thomas grinned when I pulled on the duffel. ‘You look like a boarding-school boy who’s fallen on hard times.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Here.’
He handed me a plastic object about the size of a cassette case, with a picture of Donald Duck on it. It was only when I saw the hole in one end that I realised it was a walkie-talkie. Thomas waved an identical one, except that his was adorned with Mickey Mouse, and said, ‘Communication.’
‘With these?’
‘Yes. Have you got a better suggestion?’
‘No, I just…’
‘You’d just rather have some kind of commando model, which means that anybody and everybody would know exactly what they’re for.’
‘So do they work?’
Thomas backed away to the desk, pressed a button and spoke into the handset: ‘The Nazi to the Jew, over.’
His voice emerged from Donald’s beak, tinny but clear. I pressed my button; the best I could come up with was: ‘Donald to Mickey. Over and out.’
*
We took the subway to Ropsten and changed to the Lidingö line. We didn’t exchange more than a handful of words during the entire journey. I was conscious of the way people were looking at us, and wondered what conclusions they were drawing about me. Baby skinhead, hanger-on, secret Nazi sympathiser? It was a relief to disembark in the darkness at the deserted station in Kottla.
I was surprised at my lack of nerves or pangs of conscience now things were under way. I followed Thomas along Kottlavägen and up onto Pilvägen as if I was simply travelling along a track and completing the action that had been allocated to me.
The two-storey house was illuminated only by an outdoor Christmas tree. It was on a hill, which should ensure that I had a good view while I was standing guard. We got in through a hole in the hedge at the back, which Thomas clearly knew about already. While I kept an eye on the street, Thomas attacked the lock on the French doors with a hammer and a steel bar until it gave way and the door slid open. He nodded to me and then disappeared inside. I took out my Donald Duck walkie-talkie and checked that it was switched on.
Nothing was moving apart from the falling snow, as fine as icing sugar; I could see it in the glow of the street lamps, covering the odd parked car in a layer of powder. An Audi, a BMW. After I while I got bored and took a walk around the outside of the house, staying in the shadows. Thomas hadn’t seemed bothered about leaving footprints, so I didn’t either.
I crouched down so that I could make my way over to the Christmas tree without being visible over the hedge. It was beautifully, in fact lovingly, decorated with masses of expensive baubles, tinsel and hundreds of tiny lights strung through its branches. It was the finest tree I’d ever seen, something very differ
ent from the cheap, straggly objects my mother and I usually put up in Blackeberg. Best of all, it wasn’t in a stand—it was actually growing there. It was perfect in its isolation.
I scurried back to the house. I had noticed a little shed by the garage; I opened the door and found that it was full of garden equipment. A lawnmower, a hedge cutter, spades, all barely distinguishable in the darkness. I groped around until I found a saw, then went back to the tree. The blade was far from sharp, and it took me a good five minutes to saw through the base until only a few millimetres of the trunk remained. When I straightened up, Thomas was standing there.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
I pointed at the tree. ‘If you just nudge it, it’ll fall over. It’s dead.’
‘Okay. The question still stands: What the hell are you doing?’
‘Don’t know. It seemed appropriate.’ I couldn’t stop myself—the words just came flying out of my mouth. ‘I’m a monster.’
Thomas looked from me to the tree and back again. He shook his head slowly. ‘You do know that I can’t trust you?’
‘Absolutely. How did it go?’
‘As expected.’
Before we left, I put the saw away in the shed.
I didn’t want to tell Thomas, but I knew exactly why I had destroyed the tree. I had felt nothing as I stood there outside the house with the snow gently falling. Nothing. I had crossed a definite line and entered the world of real crime by aiding and abetting in a break-in, yet I didn’t feel the least quiver of excitement, shame or fear. I was standing in a garden in the evening, observing an idyllic scene as the snow fell on beautiful homes.
I had imagined that some kind of dark satisfaction would well up and feed the monster. When that didn’t happen, I was forced to take another step. And it worked, to a certain extent. Sawing through the trunk of the tree that would take many years to replace was an unmotivated, malicious act. I knew that the owner of the house would be extremely upset, and feel violated. Every pull of the saw hurt me, while at the same time it was appropriate, and that was what I wanted. When I was finished I felt terrible, which in turn felt good.