I occasionally went into town with them because I enjoyed the sense of danger that pulsated from the group as they shoved their way through the crowds, yelling about that stubborn coconut that just wouldn’t break open.
Maybe they were less aggressive than many other gangs, because their squabbles and provocations—even minor fights in town—never crossed over into actual violence, at least not when I was with them.
A couple of days after my conversation with Lars, Thomas and I met on Gullmarsplan because a mutual friend, Palle, had got a basement flat as a sublet, and was having a party to celebrate moving in. I couldn’t travel by subway, as I’ve explained, and Thomas grinned when I got out of a cab carrying a bag from the state-owned liquor store containing a bottle of schnapps and a bottle of Fanta.
‘Jeez, have you come straight from Café Opera or what?’
We trudged along towards Grafikvägen side by side, me in my beige duffel coat with my long, unkempt hair, Thomas in his skins’ uniform with his shaven head. Once or twice someone in the gang had offered to shave my head and called me chicken when I declined. That had kicked off one of the fights, in fact, but although I enjoyed their company, I didn’t want to be part of the group to that extent. I was keeping my hair.
‘By the way,’ I said, ‘I met your dad the other day.’
‘And?’
‘And…I know you don’t care, but…’ I stopped so that I could look Thomas in the eye when I went on. ‘I’d say there’s a risk he might take his own life.’
Thomas was good at maintaining his stony-faced expression, but I could see that my words had hit home. Something about the mouth, something in the eyes, a sudden softness that passed through him before he gritted his teeth and set off again. ‘And what the fuck do you expect me to do about it?’ he snapped.
‘Nothing. I just thought you’d want to know.’
‘I don’t want to know.’
‘Okay. Forget it.’
We carried on towards Palle’s flat, where the sound of another Povel Ramel song came pouring out of the windows.
*
In the middle of February, a couple of days before we found out the truth about the Dead Couple, I went on a journey with Susanne. Until then Petronella had been my usual travelling companion, but she had now lost her job and spent her days almost exclusively arguing with the social security office and eating. She had put on so much weight that she was becoming more and more like her field body, and she rarely went down to the laundry block.
As soon as I got to know Susanne, the wariness I had felt when I first met her had gone, as I have already said, and had been replaced by a sense of dread. The essence of Susanne’s being was in fact emptiness. Because emptiness cannot have a physical manifestation, the sweet, innocent little girl she showed us in the field was no more than a provisional measure. Of us all, she was the one whose journeys caused her the least damage. On the other hand, the intensive association with the emptiness of both life in general and her own life in particular had made her frail and hesitant, as if she were gradually fading away from the world.
Before we went into the shower room, we spent a little while standing in front of the T-shirt that was still hanging on the wall. By this time I knew it was Susanne who’d put it there. She had been involved in the reporting around the Harvard affair, and believed that Palme had abused his power, like so many others. She pointed to the caricature and said, ‘He was the one we could believe in. He was going to do what he promised to do. See you again, comrades! We were going to fix things together—we were going to be together. That was the dream he sold us.’
‘We are together.’
‘Yes, but only you and I. Only at this moment. No one else. I think that’s why people hate Palme. He was elected on a dream of community and togetherness that not even he believed in.’
‘Come on.’
We went into the shower room. We travelled. Without any real desire we moved across the field. I created a rainbow and Susanne lay on the grass and gazed at it. Then she sat up and fiddled with the remains of Rebus as I stood there motionless, staring at the black wall. We returned.
The pleasures of the field had lost something of their lustre. There is always a tipping point where we become sated. By this stage the substance in the bathtub was pale grey, with wisps of white floating around in the greyness so that it increasingly resembled sperm. It was impossible to say whether this was the cause or the effect of the diminished joys of the field.
Being there was still better than the ordinary world where our false bodies chafed, but the frustration had begun to grow once more. It was as if there were something missing, as if there were one more step to take.
*
It was Åke who found the blood two or three days after Susanne and I had been on our journey. Because I lived the closest and I was usually at home, he ran up the stairs and knocked on my door. Åke had also changed since the gathering. He now went to the gym five days a week and took anabolic steroids, which had made him bulk up so much that he’d had to buy a complete new wardrobe. On that occasion he was wearing sweatpants and a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up, exposing the veins on his forearms.
I went down with him, and along the well-trodden path leading from the laundry block to the main door I could see a trail of fluid that had flowed out into the snow; it could have been anything. Coffee, oil. I was about to say that to Åke, but when he opened the door and pointed to the floor, I changed my mind.
Over the past few months I had seen enough blood in various stages of coagulation on skin, tiles and concrete to know exactly what the trail across the marble floor was. Fresh splashes and pools continued up the stairs to the Dead Couple’s door.
It says something about us that we didn’t rush straight up there, or call an ambulance. No, the first thing we did was go to the laundry block to fetch a mop, a bucket and a cloth. We spent ten minutes meticulously removing every trace of blood.
When the stairs and landing were clean, we mopped the laundry room floor, rinsed out the bucket and put everything away, then we went to see Elsa. There was an informal hierarchy; she was number one and must be kept informed.
She was almost always at home these days. The movement that had begun with her taking the photographs down from the walls had continued, and no one came to visit any more. In the middle of January Dennis had been sitting on her lap, and in a moment of weakness she had bitten him hard on the shoulder. There had been screams and tears, and as a consequence Elsa herself had told her nearest and dearest to leave her in peace, simply to protect them.
She had put on several kilos, having switched to a diet consisting almost entirely of meat. There was an element of cannibalism in her desire to envelop, and the mastication and swallowing of half-raw steak provided at least some compensation when human flesh was not available.
Åke and I told her what we’d seen, and she accompanied us to the Dead Couple’s door. We rang the bell, but no one came. We didn’t really want to call anyone from outside until we knew what we were dealing with. Just to exclude the possibility that the door was unlocked, I pushed down the handle. It opened. We glanced around the stairwell, then went inside and closed the door behind us.
If the Dead Couple had travelled with the rest of us, I would have understood them and would therefore have been unable to have an opinion about the sight that met us in their apartment, but as it was the whole thing seemed beyond sick, and I would like to warn sensitive readers at this point.
I have already described their field creature, the figure in a state of increasing symbiosis. Trying to achieve the same thing in our world with our tough skin, our dense flesh and our bleeding veins is another matter, and the pain must have been beyond belief.
There was blood everywhere. Old, congealed blood spattered across the white wallpaper, clumps and spots on the skirting boards and in corners, drops that had even reached the ceiling. The floor where we were standing was covered in fresher blood, and th
e apartment smelled like a butchery counter after a power cut.
We moved cautiously through the hallway, taking care not to step in the blood, and continued into the living room, where we found our neighbours on the white rug, which was no longer white.
Our legs and arms were covered in cuts at various stages of healing. What we saw on the bodies of the naked couple on the floor cannot be described as cuts. They were deep lacerations, wounds, gouges, cavities where shining flesh lay exposed, the skin hanging off.
A gash several centimetres long ran down the woman’s back, presumably the cause of the bleeding when I met her in the stairwell that day. The man had inserted his hand so far into this gash that his knuckles were visible beneath the skin covering her shoulder blade. He, meanwhile, had an open wound in his inner thigh, and the woman had managed to get her foot into this incision. Shreds of flesh that had been cut away to make room hung down over his knee, and his own foot was pushed into a hole in her hip.
On top of this was something that might be regarded as normal in certain circles. Her right arm had been forced as far as the elbow into his anus, while his arm was almost equally far up her vagina. To achieve their embrace, they had broken a number of bones. One of her arms was twisted in a way that isn’t possible with the skeleton intact, and one of his knees was facing in the wrong direction. They were covered in blood, and lying there on the sodden rug they looked like a pile of human slaughterhouse waste, extremities and lumps of flesh randomly tossed onto a heap.
Åke, Elsa and I stood there in silence for a long time, contemplating the conjoined creature in front of us. I haven’t mentioned this, but it was dead. The Dead Couple were dead, and what they had done would not have been possible without the syringes and phials that lay scattered around them. Morphine and fentanyl. They had drugged themselves into a state of physical numbness to bring home their project, and the drugs might well have contributed to their deaths.
I looked up at the big television that I had helped them carry up the stairs. The blank screen was splattered with blood, and from the back a cable ran to a video camera on a stand. A red light indicated that it was recording. On the shelf below the TV was a row of videotapes with handwritten, dated labels.
*
I will spare the reader a detailed description of the contents of the tapes, but I have to give a certain amount of information so that the Dead Couple’s project will make sense.
We took the camera and tapes because they might contain things that would give away our secret. No one had seen us enter the apartment, and we decided not to call the police. Hopefully it would be a few days before the stairwell started to stink, by which time any trace of us might have been destroyed by micro-organisms. We hoped.
Elsa didn’t want to see what was on the tapes; she was happy for Åke and me to report back. We went to my house and connected the video camera to the television I’d bought from the couple we were now going to observe. We were both very uncomfortable. Åke shuffled on the chair, and my fingers were sweaty as I ran them over the spines of the tapes.
‘What shall we do?’ I said. ‘Start from the beginning?’
‘Mmm. We can always fast-forward. If need be.’
Regardless of how hardened we had become by the scenes played out before our eyes in the field, looking at bodies being destroyed in this world was something quite different. I inserted the tape marked 28/9–18/10/1985.
We can always fast-forward. If need be.
The first sequence was filmed in the shower room, possibly on the night when I came home from Mona Lisa and heard the sound of fucking in there. I don’t need to go into too much detail. Violent sex with the woman leaning over the bathtub while the man frenetically thrust into her from behind. I felt myself getting slightly hard, and avoided looking at Åke. The woman was bleeding from a couple of fingertips; she dipped them in the tub from time to time and her body went limp in the man’s hands.
This went on in the same way for several days, but only very occasionally in the laundry block. He started penetrating her anally, and she stuck her fingers in his anus and his mouth. It was so monotonous that I fast-forwarded through long sections, with no complaints from Åke. I changed tapes and it was only when we reached the middle of December that things started to go seriously downhill.
By that stage their intercourse had acquired an air of desperation, and their whimpers conveyed frustration more than pleasure. Then they started cutting. First it was only small incisions, wounds that could be picked at, kept open. Distorted faces, blood trickling over their limbs. Then bigger cuts into which fingers could be inserted—and even though they gasped with pain, it was as if a transfiguring light had come over their faces.
That might have been when they realised what they were actually doing, what the aim of their project was. Until then they had simply been driven forward by the same unarticulated feeling that made me want to push people onto the subway line, for example. Now they knew what it was all about.
It only became nauseatingly hard to watch when they began to use the painkilling injections that allowed them to go significantly further. By the time we reached the tape marked 18/12/1985–10/01/1986 I had to whizz through certain parts, after a quick glance at Åke, who had curled up on the chair. Flesh was now visible in gashes several centimetres wide; skin was being peeled off to leave the nerves naked and exposed.
In a thick voice Åke said, ‘Maybe that’s enough now?’
I switched off the video-player and we sat staring at the blank TV screen for a long time, until I said the only thing I could come up with: ‘That’s what can happen.’
‘Yes, for fuck’s sake. And then they sat there watching all this.’
‘On their big TV. Yes.’
Silence once more. I ran my hand over the tapes, which would have to be destroyed or disappear, the documentation of the Dead Couple’s truest urge and longing, hidden beneath their ice-cold attitude. Beyond the field, people are very difficult to understand.
*
That evening I watched the last tape, the one that ended with an hour of stillness before Åke, Elsa and I arrived on the scene and the camera was switched off.
Does it make sense if I say that the badly assembled creature on the floor had a kind of beauty in its dead slumber? The process leading up to that final rest most definitely did not, and I had to go into the toilet and throw up before I’d finished watching. Paradoxically, the whole thing became more real when it was filmed on a neutral, static camera than when I had actually been in the room. I had to close my eyes more than once as they fought to achieve something that is not for man to create.
It seemed most likely that an overdose of morphine had led to their deaths. They injected more and more to endure what they had already done, and to keep going. They didn’t say a single word throughout, but as the final torpor approached, they looked each other in the eye and exchanged a loving smile. They had done what they had to do, or at least they had tried their best. Now their toil was at an end, so goodnight, my friend. If it hadn’t been so revolting I might have got quite carried away.
This might sound absurd, bearing in mind what I’ve already written, but it wasn’t until I had finished watching the tapes that I was struck by a thought: The field is dangerous. Then Lars came into my mind. Parts of him had already been obscured on New Year’s Eve, which was why the revolver had come as a surprise to me. The fate of the Dead Couple made it clear how far the field was capable of driving us.
It was after midnight when I picked up the phone, but I knew Thomas kept late hours like me, and often had difficulty sleeping. He answered almost right away. After greeting him briefly, I said, ‘Listen, I’m pretty sure your dad’s going to kill himself.’
‘And what the fuck do you expect me to do about it?’
I hadn’t told Thomas about Lars’s project, because it involved our secret—I had just spoken in general terms about a sense of loss. Now I took a step into more dangerous terrain: ‘Everyth
ing he does is about you. He’s trying to recapture a special moment you shared. Your ninth birthday.’
There was a brief silence. Maybe Thomas was trying to remember the occasion, or to get his head around what I’d just said. I sensed a gentler tone in his voice when he said, ‘What are you talking about? How could he possibly do that?’
I came up with a neutral response. ‘He believes he can. He thinks it’s possible. He’s bought all the things you had on the day. Your presents. The cake. Everything. And he intends to kill himself when it’s all in place.’
‘What sort of a crazy fucking idea is that? How’s he come up with such a stupid plan?’
‘I don’t know. He really misses you.’
‘He doesn’t want anything to do with me.’
‘I think you’re wrong, and I also think you ought to go and see him. I’ll come with you if you want.’
‘Why do you care about any of this?’
The answer I gave would have surprised me a few months earlier, to say the least. ‘Because I care about you.’
Thomas wasn’t someone who explained himself or his decisions, so it was equally unexpected and natural when he said, ‘I’ll be there tomorrow at seven.’
‘Good. See you then.’
‘Goodnight, you fucking pansy.’
*
I slept well that night. I no longer had problems sleeping since I’d started travelling. If you don’t have a physiological problem, then it’s usually thoughts that keep you awake. Since I’d stopped thinking about myself and my shortcomings, sleep usually came quickly.
I started the day by going up to see Elsa and briefly reporting on what I’d seen on the tapes. We agreed that they must be destroyed, and I offered to deal with the matter.