The gash in my arm had been sucked clean, and the edges of the wound had begun to stick together. We must have been away for a long time. I tried to think Now what? or something along those lines, but all that came into my mind was a black wall and that fateful engine noise from ‘Stripped’. The only reasonable possibility was that this moment would go on forever. There was no way out of this room, no escape from Gunnar’s sobbing.
I might have fallen asleep a few times. At any rate, I had summoned up enough strength to get to my feet when there was a knock on the door. Someone wanted to come into the laundry room.
‘What time is it?’ I whispered to Åke, who was the only one who wore a watch.
There was another knock before the answer came. Eleven-thirty. Nobody ever did their washing at that hour; it wasn’t even allowed. I went over to the door and fiddled with the broom handle; I didn’t know what to do.
It was only when the third knock came that I realised it wasn’t coming from the outside door, but from the shower room. Someone was in there, wanting to be let out. I held my breath and looked the others in the eye, one by one. I was absolutely certain that Petronella hadn’t been in there when I left the room. The person knocking was a…new arrival.
Up until that moment we’d had control, or at least the element of predictability that even the worst junkie has when it comes to his next fix. He might be lost in the eyes of society, but at least he knows what he’s dealing with. This was something new, an unforeseen consequence of our trips. Something had been created.
We looked at one another. No one moved. The door was pushed outwards, rattling the padlock. I switched on the light and whispered, ‘What shall we do?’ Under different circumstances Elsa, Gunnar, Åke and Susanne would have looked quite comical, because all four were sitting in exactly the same pose, eyes wide open with a hand in front of their mouth, like children whose game has gone too far, and who just want to go home to safety and security. Another knock.
Whatever was on the other side of the door, it was a relief that it was knocking. It suggested some kind of human rationality, or even politeness. Excuse me, could you please let me out?
‘It’s the thing that was in the bathtub,’ Gunnar said, his voice still thick with tears. ‘What else could it be?’
I remembered what the slime had looked like a while ago, the unfinished creature striving to get out. We had nourished it with our blood and our dreams, and now it was complete. I placed the palm of my hand on the shower room door and remembered what I had thought after a conversation with the busker: There is no evidence that whatever lies beyond means us any harm. It is far more likely that it’s indifferent.
That was pure speculation. As I felt the door vibrate with the impact of another knock, I wasn’t quite so sure. I reached for the padlock and glanced at the others for guidance. Only Gunnar nodded. I took a deep breath, turned the key and removed the padlock. I backed away from the door, which slowly opened.
The creature that emerged had a human form, but that was all I could say. At first I had the impression that it was entirely white with no features, then I thought it resembled Martin Gore from Depeche Mode, and the next moment it was that terrible policeman from when I was twelve years old. Before I had time to feel scared it had changed again. This time it looked like Olof Palme, then it was white and shiny once more, with a pair of big eyes and a mouth.
I heard someone gasp, and I didn’t know whether it was because of the creature’s shapeshifting ability, or the fact that it was holding the revolver that Lars had dropped in the bathtub. I was standing two metres in front of it, and raised my hands to show that I surrendered, if that was what it wanted.
There was nothing to suggest that was the case. The figure, which was in a constant state of metamorphosis, seemed just as bewildered as we were. It looked from one to the other, its features changing depending on whose eyes it met. A whole range of appearances flickered past and disappeared in the place where its face was meant to be, but Olof Palme’s recurred with increasing frequency.
I edged cautiously sideways until I was near the others, then slid down onto the floor. The creature was still standing there as we stared at it, its features constantly shifting. Elsa said breathlessly, ‘It’s trying to decide.’
‘Decide what?’
‘What we want to see. What we are.’
I gazed at the figure, its face now displaying Olof Palme’s distinctive nose flanked by deep lines that came and went depending on which age it was trying to portray. If the creature was cut from the same cloth as the field, with its origins in our blood and our dreams, then it was now trying to find a form that was not individual but collective, our lowest common denominator and our movement. It was settling on the idea that this we was to be represented by Olof Palme.
I have only mentioned the face so far, but the body and clothes were shifting equally rapidly, like a video tape on fast forward; watching it made me feel dizzy. I closed my eyes and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyelids in an attempt to stop a headache that was threatening to explode. My brain felt like a sandbag that had received far too many blows, and was about to burst open and spill out its contents. I heard someone stand up, and just about managed to open my eyes sufficiently to see what was happening.
Gunnar had positioned himself directly in front of the creature, which had almost consolidated into the Olof Palme who was our current prime minister, wearing corduroy trousers and a medium-length overcoat, the hand holding the revolver concealed in a pocket. Only the odd ripple of another appearance passed across its face.
Gunnar stepped forward and spread his arms wide. For a moment it looked as if he intended to wrestle the creature to the ground, but then I saw that he had ripped open his wounds and was bleeding from both arms as he enveloped Olof Palme in a bear hug.
They stood like that for a little while, then Gunnar began to be absorbed by the thing he was embracing. His chest disappeared into Palme’s chest, as if he were sinking into some kind of viscous substance. His shoulders were forced back and he loosened his hold at the same moment as his head became part of the creature’s head.
Those of us who remained sat on the floor and watched Gunnar slowly being sucked into the other world through the portal that had acquired a human form. The last thing we saw was the fingers of his right hand, fluttering briefly like those of a dreamer, before they slipped into the crook of Palme’s arm and were gone.
The figure stretched, now one single entity. It looked at us with black, empty eyes and opened and closed its mouth as if it wanted to say something but had no language in which to say it.
It turned its head from side to side. It was hard to say where its bottomless gaze rested, but there was something pleading about its posture. It almost seemed to be seeking our help, without knowing what that help might consist of. When none of us stirred or spoke, the creature shrugged its shoulders in a jerky gesture before moving over to the outside door, opening it and walking out into the courtyard.
*
I don’t think any of my readers will be unaware of where this is going, where it’s been going right from the start. With hindsight everything seems so clear. The building blocks were in place and the movement had begun. Unfortunately it is only distance in terms of time that makes such a perspective possible; back then, when everything was close to me, I saw only chaos and understood nothing.
As I write this narrative almost thirty years later, I find it difficult to comprehend my own actions. How could I have been willing to sacrifice so much to be in the field? Regardless of what I have said previously about homecoming, truth and pleasure, those are only words. The feeling escapes me, and while I have been writing I have started each day by listening to Laleh’s ‘A Little While on the Earth’ and have then left it playing in the background, hoping that its joyous sound will help me to capture it on the page.
I was close, I was close, I was close, I was THERE.
It is playing now as I write and
it helps, but still I only get close. I can’t get there any more, and maybe that’s for the best. If I really did manage to describe everything perfectly I would have no need to write in the future, and then what would I do? In the absence of alternatives I must follow Beckett’s example—continue to fail, and fail better.
It might seem as if my neighbours and I were strangely passive in the face of what was unfolding before our eyes. Maybe we were, but for one thing we were completely exhausted, and for another there is a line beyond which an event becomes so alien that it is impossible to intervene. The planes that flew into the World Trade Center, or the tsunami. When you have no experiences to help you deal with a particular occurrence, the normal reaction is simply to stand there and stare, if you survive, and afterwards to say, ‘It was just like a movie.’
I didn’t have the tools to deal with seeing a white creature laboriously take on the appearance of Olof Palme and then absorb one of my neighbours, so like the others I sat there and let it happen. When the creature had left us and we heard the street door slam behind it, we still sat there without saying a word.
Just like the previous night, the sequence of events at this stage had a dreamlike quality. I was so cripplingly tired, and if I stick to the image of my brain as a sandbag, I felt as if it had now split and disgorged its contents beneath my eyelids. I can’t remember whether we spoke to one another, can’t remember how I got home, but at least I laid out the mattress before I fell asleep.
*
I woke up around dawn. The night before I had felt as if I’d been rolling in a bed of nettles; now it was as if an army of red ants was having a party on my right arm. I blinked at the grey light seeping in through the blinds, and prayed to God to let me go back to sleep. The forthcoming day would be hellish enough without a lack of sleep. I drew my knees up to my stomach, rested my arm on top of the covers so they wouldn’t chafe, and managed to embrace the darkness.
It was after two o’clock in the afternoon when I rose to the surface once more. I lay there with the covers pulled up to my nose, and discovered that I didn’t feel as bad as I’d expected. Empty and worn out, but the nightmare that I had feared would sink its claws into me as soon as I regained consciousness was keeping its distance, and all that remained of the pain in my arm was an itch. I looked at the wound between my thumb and forefinger and the wound on my arm, and felt something like happiness at the thought that I would never harm myself again—that it was over.
I rolled onto my side, switched on the turntable and dropped the needle onto ‘Somebody Up There Must Like Me’, then I got up and filled the coffee machine. After I’d listened to the song several times and drunk four cups of coffee, I picked up the record and broke it in half. I dropped the pieces in the bin, then got dressed and went out.
It was a beautiful afternoon with the smell of snow in the air and a high, clear sky. I blinked at the light and the clarity of everything, like someone who has been wearing sunglasses and just taken them off. The colours of the cars parked on the hill nearby shone brightly, and windows covered in rime frost reflected the sunlight in subtle nuances I hadn’t noticed for a very long time.
At the risk of droning on, at that moment it felt as if everything that had happened was a feverish dream from which I had now awoken. I walked along Luntmakargatan enjoying the perception that I had legs to walk with and feet to stand on, appreciating the worldly body that had seemed to me so false and contemptible. No doubt it would all catch up with me soon enough, but the mere fact that I wanted to live was more than I had expected.
Sveavägen was bathed in sunlight, and after a couple of hundred metres I needed to rest my eyes, so I went into a cafe I’d never visited before. I had a café au lait and a cinnamon pastry while I read a copy of Dagens Nyheter that someone had left behind. I hadn’t caught up with the news for a few months, and a lot had happened while I was wrapped up in myself. Ferdinand Marcos had fled the Philippines, and Gorbachev had condemned the Brezhnev era. Things were looking up in several parts of the world. They had even launched the Viking satellite at long last.
I continued my stroll along Sveavägen past the Grand, where they were showing The Mozart Brothers, but I decided it probably wasn’t my kind of film. I went to McDonald’s for a Big Mac before heading home.
As I was passing the builders’ huts and the closed entrance to the subway station, I looked up at the steps leading to the Brunkeberg Tunnel. The sky darkened and the easy lightness in my body dissipated. Next to the cast-iron plaque at the bottom of the steps stood that policeman. I froze on the spot, clenched my fists in my coat pockets and was about to run to my door when I noticed the barely perceptible flicker in his expression, the indecisiveness in his dark eyes. As soon as I had seen through the figure it became a white creature with no distinguishing features. Its hands were hidden by the plaque, and I couldn’t see if it was still holding the revolver.
The face turned in my direction, and a shudder ran through me as I dashed inside and stopped at the foot of the stairs. I didn’t know what a rotting corpse smelled like, but the faint odour of strawberry ice-cream mixed with excrement drifting down from the upper floor could hardly be anything else, and I hurried out into the fresh air of the courtyard.
The party was over, and all that remained was the clearing-up and the uninvited guest who refused to go home. When I opened the door of my house and looked at my dark hovel and the mattress lying on the floor, I decided to move. I didn’t want to stay in the middle of all this misery now that it was nothing more than misery—I wanted to get away, start afresh, forget.
I spent the evening reading Beckett. You think you’ve had enough, but that is rarely the case.
*
As far as I was concerned, the day that would change Sweden forever began with a phone call to my landlord. I was supposed to give two months’ notice on the non-existent contract, but I had an enormous stroke of luck. Someone else wanted my house, and I could move out in two weeks, plus there was a one-room apartment available on Kungsholmen if I was interested. I was definitely interested, and arranged to go and see it later on.
I hung up with hope beginning to grow in my heart. Maybe it would be possible to put all this behind me, place parentheses around this part of my story too. After breakfast I took another step towards freedom by travelling on the subway for the first time in a month.
On the platform I made a point of standing just behind an elderly man who was half a metre from the edge. An arrow of light shot along the rails, a gust of wind made my hair flutter, then the first carriage came thundering out of the tunnel.
A smile crossed my lips, my hands flew up of their own accord and with a shiver of pure lust I saw the little man’s startled expression as he fell onto the track and was mashed to a pulp beneath the wheels of the train. For one liberating, horrific moment I thought it had really happened, but I had managed to stop my hands in time and clenched them tightly across my body. The man stepped on board without having noticed anything, and I followed him.
The monster was still living inside my body, and that was something I had to deal with. I would need strategies and discipline to keep it locked away. Even if it took a number of years, that subway journey might have been when the first seed was sown that would eventually lead to what became my job. Writing stories about the monster is one way of appeasing it.
I got off at Fridhemsplan and walked over to Svarvargatan, where I was shown a small, shabby apartment that would cost me four thousand a month. I said yes right away. There was a large window with a view of the Karlberg Canal; there was light. I could become someone else in this place.
By the time I got back to the house on Luntmakargatan, in my mind I had already left it. If it had been possible to move the same day, I would have done so. The smell in the stairwell had become even more noticeable now that I was aware of it, or maybe it was getting stronger. However much I would miss my neighbours and what we’d had, I didn’t want to be here any longer. It was over
.
The infection in my hand had started to recede, and an X-shaped scab had begun to form on my right arm. I had more or less managed to cut along the lines that were already there, but the scar would probably be even uglier than it had been before. I would just have to live with that, like so many other things. I opened both windows and spent the rest of the day cleaning.
*
In the evening I decided to go and see the comedy film Whiskers and Peas at the Saga cinema. While doing my housework I had got myself into such a state of enthusiasm and optimism about the future that I didn’t give the visitor from the other world a thought until I passed the builders’ huts on Tunnelgatan and found it standing right in front of me.
There were plenty of people out and about who could see it moving around on Sveavägen, and no one seemed to find anything strange about the white figure staring into the window of Dekorima, because everyone saw what they wanted to see. An ordinary person interested in the display, nothing more.
The creature’s attention was focused on the mirror. I kept very close to the wall of the building opposite so that I could sneak past and avoid those black eyes fastening on me. When I was directly behind it I stole a glance over its shoulder. Reflected in the mirror I saw myself standing a couple of metres behind Olof Palme, and when I looked back at the creature it had taken on the same appearance as its reflection, which I assumed was its self-image. Our eyes met in the mirror, and the impotence in those dark orbs haunted me as I carried on along Kungsgatan.
A sense of foreboding hovered inside my body and stopped me from enjoying the film, which was apparently very funny. Roars of laughter filled the cinema when Gösta Ekman took a rolled-up tartan blanket for a walk as if it were a dog, but instead of laughing I was seized by a fit of shivering, and pulled my duffel coat more tightly around me.