The sense of distortion grows: it is like being on a boat that is beginning to list. The atmosphere of the field is changing and I know why. Lars isn’t supposed to be here. Death isn’t supposed to be here.
The dense darkness on the horizon has acquired a shimmer that reflects the monochrome light of the sky, and I see a movement in the grass far away, a movement that is coming closer as the wall of darkness grows.
Only when it is about a hundred metres away from me am I able to work out what it is. The wall is not growing: a cloud is billowing out from it. Rain is falling from the cloud, racing towards me. I run, and have managed to get about fifty metres away from Lars by the time the rain reaches him. The drops land on his body, burning holes all over his skin. He is dissolving, disappearing.
I spin around. The black wall looms up from the horizon in all directions. The field is shrinking, being sucked into itself. Then the rain is upon me.
I just have time to feel the first drops burning through my thick skin, to see the red smoke mingling with the black before I am jerked back and I am on my knees at the end of the bathtub.
*
An odour of burnt flesh found its way into my nostrils, and my body felt as if I had been rolling in a bed of nettles. The substance in the bathtub had now become solid, and looked like lard. When I pressed the surface with my uninjured hand, there was no give. Lars was gone, sucked down into the whiteness, no longer in this world. I slumped on the floor and rested my forehead on the side of the bath.
It is ending.
I had no idea how the field had come into existence, but I knew that it was in the process of coming to an end. The chaotic possibility would become an impossibility as the slime hardened and the door closed. The wall of darkness was growing, the horizon was contracting. Soon neither would exist. The place had once again got me in its clutches, and the knowledge that it would no longer be there evoked a paralysing sense of grief. All I could do was to sit there with my head on the enamel, weeping.
It is ending.
Looking back it seems utterly grotesque, but my grief was as deep as if I had watched a much-loved person fade away and slip into death, taking the future with them. There was nothing left. I looked at the wall, spattered with the blood and brain matter from inside Lars’s head, I looked at my empty hands crisscrossed with scars and I carried on weeping.
I dragged myself home across the courtyard and sank down on my chair. Once again I felt a powerful urge to kill myself. The revolver had fallen out of Lars’s hand before he was taken, and presumably it was still in the bathtub. That was a possibility. Anything rather than live through the night.
Take me away.
It all came down to the fact that I didn’t have the energy. I sat and stared at the wall for half an hour. Then I got up and cleaned the wound with washing-up liquid over the sink before curling up on the floor. I didn’t bother laying out the mattress. My body was wracked by convulsions, then I fell asleep.
I can’t swear that what happened next wasn’t a dream. My state of mind was so confused and agitated that Raskolnikov comes across as a clear-headed individual by comparison. When I turned over in my sleep, the pain of my burned skin shot through me, waking me up. I didn’t know if it was day or night, or which world I was in. The only indication that I was awake and real was the pain in my hand and the heat of my skin. I sat up and stared into the darkness.
I don’t know how it came about, but a little while later I was standing in the street. Was I wearing my outdoor clothes? Boots? I can’t say: I see the images as if I were a stranger peering out through my own eyes. It has started snowing again. It is dark. My head is aching, and when I press my fingertips to my temples, I notice that I have put on the head torch.
Only then do I understand what I’m doing. One step at a time I make my way along Luntmakargatan and turn right into Tunnelgatan. The Bohemia restaurant is empty and the lights are out. I don’t feel the cold against the soles of my feet, so presumably I do have my boots on. I am moving towards the Brunkeberg Tunnel.
The snow muffles every sound, or else there are no sounds to hear. The city has fallen silent; all movement has ceased. There is not a footprint to be seen in the blanket of snow on the steps leading to Döbelnsgatan. I blink as the flakes fall into my eyes, and switch on the head torch. A cone of light slices through the snow and illuminates the glass doors of the tunnel.
The child is standing there with the tiger beside him, as if they have been waiting for me. The child has his hood pulled up over his bowed head, and only when I reach the door does he look up, narrowing his eyes against the light.
There is no more than half a metre between us, and even though the glass is dirty, I can see the child’s face with absolute clarity. I stagger and reach out to the brick wall for support. The face is less of a face and more of a badly healed wound. A deep X-shaped incision runs from the left temple to the right jawbone, from the right temple to the left jawbone, dividing the face into four. Each eye has its own section, the mouth too. The nose is crushed at the bridge where the lines meet; they must have been inflicted with considerable force and violence. I cannot look any more, and when I glance down at my feet the snow is far too close and I realise that I have dropped to my knees.
Through the glass I can hear the child humming ‘Somebody Up There Must Like Me’. The sound fades as he moves away along the tunnel, but I don’t look up. I draw an X in the snow with one finger as the dampness soaks through the knees of my trousers.
*
When I woke up in the middle of the day, I found myself lying on the floor of my house. At some point during the night I must have felt cold, because I had pulled my duffel coat over me. The knees of my trousers were damp, so I assumed the events of the night had happened in one of the worlds, or on the borderline between them.
A thin scab had formed over the wound on my right hand, and my left arm was aching because I’d slept with it bent under my head. The dust from the floor tickled my nostrils, and a violent sneeze sent a shock through my skull that made me sit bolt upright.
It is ending.
The skin on the nape of my neck and my back stretched tight as I wrapped my arms around my knees and drew them up to my chin. I felt terrible, and the solace the field provided was about to disappear for me, for all of us. Soon there would only be February left. February and flat, grey days to drag myself through.
I shivered as I pulled myself up onto my chair, then spent half an hour calling the neighbours at home or at work. I told them what had happened to Lars, and what was happening to the field: the portal was closing, or had already closed. After a series of conversations it was decided that we would meet at seven for one last journey, if that were still possible.
I sat there with my duffel coat wrapped around me, feeling heavy and empty. My heart was beating slowly, like the pulse in ‘Stripped’. Everything in my house was infected by the approaching farewell, and I decided to seek refuge in the streets. I swallowed a couple of painkillers and put on two jumpers underneath my duffel. When I reached the stairwell I sniffed, checking for the smell of decaying corpses, but I was getting a cold, and my nose was also blocked by dust. I couldn’t detect anything, and went on my way.
It was 26 February, but winter still had Stockholm firmly in its grip. However, the air was damp and a low-lying cloud of exhaust fumes hovered over Sveavägen when I came out of Tunnelgatan.
I walked along with my hands in my pockets, inhaling the petrol fumes as I glanced at the displays in the shops. I resisted the temptation of the mirror in Dekorima’s window but then stopped for a while outside Casablanca, where they were offering a video-player and two films for two hundred kronor. I wasn’t interested; I had already seen enough, and felt a sudden urge to rub dirty snow in my face. Instead I moved on.
A hundred metres further along I stopped again at a secondhand record shop. An LP I recognised from my childhood was in the window, and my stomach contracted when I looked into Jan Sparring’s pious eyes. A bla
ck shirt with the top buttons undone and a jacket in exactly the same colour as my duffel coat. Jan Sparring Sings Country. My mother had played it often enough for me to remember that ‘Somebody Up There Must Like Me’ was one of the tracks.
It was like finding a carelessly thrown together arrow made of branches in the forest. Is it there by chance, or has it been deliberately placed there? What is it pointing to? For most people it doesn’t matter—there’s an arrow, so you go where it’s pointing. I went into the shop and paid ten kronor for the album, then hurried home.
Listening to the song made me feel neither happier nor sadder. I grasped nothing that I hadn’t grasped before, but as I sat on the floor in front of the turntable at least I experienced a tenuous sense of context and connection as Jan Sparring sang about how good life had been to him, how he had lacked nothing. There was an air of summing up, of departure about the lyrics, sitting on a moving train and waving goodbye to something that has been good and is now over.
Jan assured me that somebody up there must like him, somebody who had given him everything. He wondered why he had been so fortunate, and finally pointed out how little we understood.
I could definitely identify with the last line. As usual I listened to the song over and over again as the afternoon turned to evening. The wound in my hand started to hurt, and when I squeezed it pus oozed out. I washed it and applied a dressing. I cooked a pan of rice, tipped in a tin of black beans and ate sitting on the floor with my back leaning against the desk. I counted my money. I cried a couple of times. When I had finished crying, I put the song on again. At quarter to seven I put on my best white shirt and the trousers from my suit, then went down to the laundry block.
*
The only person who had arrived was Petronella. She was sitting on the chair fanning herself with a magazine. It must have taken a huge effort for her to get down there, because she weighed at least thirty kilos more than when I first saw her, and rolls of fat spilled over the arms of the chair. When I came in she turned to me with sadness in her eyes and said, ‘It’s impossible.’
‘What’s impossible?’
‘Living. Living is impossible. Without it.’
‘I know. It’s hard.’
Petronella shook her head and the smooth, puffy sacs of fat beneath her chin rolled to the sides as she said, ‘Not hard. Impossible. It can’t be done.’
‘Surely it can.’
‘Why?’
I had asked myself that question without coming up with an answer. Why should we live? In the end it’s a matter of how appealing we find the alternative. Maybe something else too. I said, ‘If there’s an arrow in the forest. You follow it. Just because it’s there.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know. We’re here.’
‘I don’t want to be here.’
One by one the others turned up, until we were all gathered. Several expressed feelings similar to Petronella’s, but it was only Gunnar who displayed the same degree of despair. His left hand was bandaged. He hadn’t doubted the truth of my message on the phone, and after our conversation he had gone into the staff kitchen at work, turned the electric hotplate up high and placed his hand on it. He was now signed off sick for an indefinite period.
Susanne, Åke and Elsa were more like me. Their voices and body language would have been appropriate at a loved one’s funeral, but at least it was a loved one’s funeral and not their own. This life was over, but unlike Petronella and Gunnar they were able to consider the possibility that there was another life, even if it was hard to see right now.
We opened the door of the shower room, where the white substance in the bathtub was moving all on its own, like a creature trapped inside a thick layer of rubber, its limbs groping beneath the covering, searching for a way out.
‘What’s happening?’ Elsa asked.
‘I’ve no idea,’ I replied. ‘It’s changing. Everything’s changing. It’s coming to an end.’
We turned off the light in the laundry room, barricaded the door by pushing a broom through the handle, then gathered around the bathtub. We had to help Petronella to get down on her knees. We looked at one another, and there was so much sorrow in the room that it was a seventh, invisible presence, hovering above our heads. We cut our hands and pressed our palms on the white surface.
The blood flowed in thin trickles, forming pools that were absorbed as if by osmosis. But nothing happened. We weren’t transported. Gunnar slapped down his hand so that a shudder ran through the white mass and yelled, ‘Come on! Come on! Just once more!’ As if his plea had had an effect, the field flickered before our eyes, only to disappear again. We slumped to the floor.
‘More blood,’ I said. ‘It wants more blood.’
‘How do you know?’ Susanne asked.
‘I don’t know anything—I’m just guessing. If anyone has a better idea, then please say.’
No one had a better idea. I leaned over the edge again and placed the blade of the knife in the crook of my right arm where one branch of the X-shaped scar began. In spite of all the times I had harmed myself in order to travel, this went against the grain. For one thing it would be a much bigger wound and would really hurt, and for another I would be tearing apart something that my body had knitted together.
I gritted my teeth and began to cut. The first few centimetres were easy. The knife was sharp and I didn’t have to press too hard to pierce the skin. Then came the reaction. In the past I had simply made an incision, pushed my hand into the bathtub and off I went. Now I had time to feel the nerves protesting, sending pain and revulsion throbbing up through my arm and into my brain, a message that said: Stop, don’t do it!
I didn’t stop. When I reached my wrist I narrowed my eyes, pretending that I was looking at nothing more than a piece of pale meat.
My other senses weren’t having any of it. The taste of rusty iron filled my mouth, and I could hear the blood dripping into the bath. My left hand stiffened, unwilling to complete its task, so I gripped the handle more firmly and dragged the knife back up towards the crook of my arm, following the line of the X and making a deep gash. Air was forced in and out through my nose in short gasps as the lines met and I carried on upwards. My entire arm was now covered in so much blood that I could no longer see the scar, and I was working blind as I completed the last couple of centimetres.
I dropped the knife, lowered my throbbing, burning arm onto the surface and felt it stick fast as if it were being held by a faint magnetic force or a sucking reflex. Through half-closed eyelids I saw that my neighbours had also begun to make longer and deeper cuts, and that the white substance was now covered in streams of red. Only when the light changed did I open my eyes. We were in the field.
*
Gunnar is running, lifting his arms to the sky. His screams express triumph as much as pain. The black wall on the horizon is closer than ever, and it feels as if we are in the bottom of a sack that is slowly being drawn up. At my feet lie the ring that Lars was wearing and his gold fillings. Everything else has been eaten away and disappeared. I leave them where they are.
We do everything we can, everything we love in the field, but with greater intensity and for longer. We wander around in our true bodies, we fight, we embrace, we dance and we enjoy, as if these were the final moments before the bomb drops and it’s all over.
We have never stayed in the field for so long, and we reach a point where even our field bodies are exhausted. Åke, Susanne, Elsa and I lie on our backs on the grass. Only the children inside Elsa’s body keep moving, their giggles rising up to the sky.
I turn my head and see Petronella’s fat lady moving off towards the darkness. She manages only a few steps before her body collapses under its own weight. She tries to get back on her feet, but without anything to hold on to she is like a beached whale, rocking helplessly from side to side.
We know what she is trying to do and why, so we get up and help her. Åke is the strongest, so he grabs both her wri
sts while Susanne and I take a leg each. Elsa’s field body, like Petronella’s, is incapable of doing very much apart from being there. She stumbles after us as we drag Petronella towards the darkness.
The closer we get, the stronger the attraction. The darkness is pulling at our bodies, but only Petronella has answered its call. We don’t know what is in there, but Petronella refuses to return to the ordinary world. Anything is better than that.
The fat lady weighs several hundred kilos, and we only just manage. I send magic to levitate her, which helps a little, but I can’t lift her. My powers are fading. We haul her across the grass, the fat billowing beneath her overstretched skin.
The darkness is sharply delineated. It really does rise from the ground like a wall, hiding part of the sky. When we are a few metres away, we have neither the strength nor the courage to go on. We sink down on the grass, utterly spent, and watch as the fat lady wriggles and rolls, dragging herself forward by sinking her fingers into the ground. We hear her whisper ‘Thank you’ before she disappears into the darkness with a deep sigh and a final heave.
The last thing I see before we return is Gunnar, running towards us across the field. Then we are back in the shower room.
*
We didn’t know how long we’d been away. The bulb in the ceiling light had gone out, and the room was dark. Our bodies were physically exhausted, and all we could do was crawl into the laundry room. I was the last; I turned back and whispered, ‘Petronella? Petronella?’, but there was no answer. Nor could I make out the shape of her body in the faint light seeping in through the window facing onto the courtyard. She was gone, just as she had wished. I closed the door and secured the padlock before crawling away and collapsing, leaning against one of the tumble dryers.
I could hear the others breathing, see the contours of their bodies slumped against walls or machines. It was over. We had been on our last journey. Gunnar convulsed with a sob from time to time as he sat there with his head drooping between his knees. He had been on his way to the darkness, but he hadn’t made it in time. Now he was doomed to live in this world, and I didn’t think he’d be with us for very long.