‘Okay. Goodnight, then.’
‘Goodnight.’
I lifted the phone down from the desk and put it on the floor next to the mattress. I placed the receiver on my pillow, then lay down and looked at it for a while. Via that piece of plastic I was in touch with another human being somewhere. I think I might even have stroked the receiver with my index finger.
There wasn’t a sound from the other end, and when I felt myself drifting into sleep, I murmured, ‘Are you there?’ but there was no response. Then I must have dropped off.
*
I slept unusually well that night. The first thing I saw when I woke up was the receiver lying beside me. What had happened the previous night seemed like something entirely detached from reality.
Reality? What did I know about reality?
I picked up the receiver and listened. There wasn’t a sound. I tentatively whispered ‘Hello?’ so as not to wake the person on the other end if they were sleeping. No answer. When I replaced the receiver in its cradle and then lifted it again, I heard the dial tone.
I sat naked on my chair, trying to orientate myself in the world. It didn’t go too well. I told myself it was because of the forthcoming Nordic Championships, that all my practising had caused me to lose touch with reality—but I had been in more or less the same state since I was twelve years old. The odd visit, brief periods of intimacy with life—like a pig glancing up from its trough and taking in its surroundings—then back to the vagueness, back to the swill.
I was no longer sure that the idea of writing down the story of the child in the forest was such a good idea. In a way it merely reinforced my lack of contact with normality. However, the narrative had been started, so it would be completed. If there’s one good thing you can say about me, it’s that I finish whatever I start. I see things through.
My mood was well suited to describing the hallucinatory state I had entered following my experience in the tree house, so I picked up my pen and carried on writing.
*
He didn’t wake up until his mother knocked on the door and said that dinner was ready. He went into the kitchen and chewed his way through a meal of stuffed cabbage leaves without even noticing what he was eating. He gave monosyllabic answers to his mother’s questions about his day, lying out of sheer habit. His mother asked if he was sick and the boy replied that yes, he was probably sick.
And maybe that was true. Later on, when he and his mother were watching Little House on the Prairie, he had started shivering. The sight of the Ingalls’ warm and simple lives almost made him cry, and he was on the point of telling his mother everything that had happened, but was prevented by her verbose lamentations over the state he was in. She tucked him up in bed, a cup of tea with honey on his bedside table.
The boy lay on his side, studying the steam rising from the cup. The greyness in his head began to clear, like when you rub your hand over the condensation on a window. He contemplated the steam and thought about the smoke in the tree house. What had actually happened?
He had inhaled the smoke, and been transported to a field. It wasn’t as if he had seen the field in a fleeting vision, in passing—no, he had actually been there. He knew this because the field and the blue sky weren’t just as real as the bed in which he was lying. They were much more real.
For a long time the boy had experienced the world as unreal. If someone had told him that life was a stage set and all the people were aliens in disguise it would have been hard to believe, but at the same time it would have confirmed a feeling he had, a suspicion if you like. That everything was pretend.
The field was different. During the few seconds the boy had been there, he had felt entirely present. The experience had been much too short for him to get a proper grip on it, but one thing he knew for sure: he wanted to go there again.
He was totally certain that he’d been in contact with something mysterious and possibly dangerous, but at the same time it offered the possibility of something else. If there was something he wanted out of life, it was something different. He took a couple of sips of the tea, which was lukewarm by now, then fell asleep.
He woke up terrified in the middle of the night and sat up in bed. It took a horrific minute before he managed to convince himself that what he had just dreamed wasn’t a memory, that it hadn’t actually happened.
When he slumped back on the pillow he still wasn’t sure, and couldn’t settle. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, drank some of the cold tea and looked around the dark room. His eyes settled on the poster of Gene Simmons from Kiss. The monster mask, the long tongue. There was pretend fear, and there was real fear.
The boy had dreamed that he had killed the child, and he remembered why he had done it. To become a different person. To stop being a kid who was bullied, and to become a murderer instead. To step over the boundary, to be transformed. In the dream something had happened to him when he stuck the knife in the child. Something that wasn’t good, yet it was desirable.
The conviction he’d felt in the dream was jammed there in his chest, black and sticky, and he drank more tea in an attempt to wash it down. He got up and went over to the window, resting his hands on the warm marble shelf above the radiator, and looked out across the courtyard.
There wasn’t a soul in sight. The lamps above the doors were lit, but the yard with its play area and climbing frame lay in shadow. The boy had felt this way on a couple of previous occasions when he woke up in the night and went to stand by the window, and now it came over him again: the sense that something was about to happen. Something unheard of, an approaching revelation, or rather the perception that someone was going to come.
He waited, motionless, by the window. No one came. Nothing happened. The perception faded and disappeared altogether. It hadn’t happened this time either. Or maybe it had, but not here.
The boy crawled back into bed. The tea had made him feel wide awake, and he lay there for a long time thinking about the forces that move in the darkness. Inside us and beyond us. He thought ‘hand’ and was amazed that he could see a hand inside his head. Whose hand was it? And what was that knife it was holding? What is real? What is important?
*
Those questions hadn’t changed during the seven years that had passed, and the answers were still notable by their absence. I sat there glaring at the dirty dishes in the sink and tried to imagine a future in which I would have found peace and would be living in the world. The only picture that appeared was the Ingalls family in Little House on the Prairie, and the Moomin family. I had no starting point for a fantasy of my own. No doubt this contributed to my inability to feel any kind of connection or sense of community, to the fact that I didn’t see myself as part of a greater movement, my life.
My life.
The most banal insights are often the most important. Like the realisation that we have one life, only one, and that we have to take care of it. Self-evident, of course, but there’s a difference between knowing something theoretically and being struck by its essential truth.
My life.
I felt a wave of dizziness as I sat there on my chair, staring at the washing-up. I had a life—my disconnected days were links in a chain reaching backwards and forwards. I was on my way somewhere, and this trivial thought excited me.
For example, I was going to get myself a television. I got dressed, went down to the main door and made a note of the number on the ad: FOR SALE—SMALL TV. PERFECT WORKING ORDER. 500KR. It was handwritten, but the lines were so straight and even that it could have been printed by a machine. I would ring in the afternoon, but first I decided to have a shower before tackling the day and the city.
As I crossed the courtyard, the sky looked like a bright blue lid on top of the roofs. The sun lit up the top two floors of the four-storey buildings, making the window panes flash like the goodness of God, or signals from someone in distress at sea. I thought about the Ingalls family—how as far as I recalled, a large part of the action consis
ted of them sitting around the dinner table, discussing everything under the sun. My mind wandered freely and idly until I unlocked the door of the laundry block and stepped into the room, which smelled of softener.
Run!
Like an animal sensing danger, I instinctively cowered, trying to make myself a smaller target. I took several deep breaths and stood there motionless. Nothing happened, and I cautiously straightened up. Everything looked perfectly normal, but the awareness of a threat remained. I don’t know if ‘threat’ is the right word. It was more like the feeling I had when I stood by the window in Blackeberg with my hands resting on the warm marble shelf, the feeling that someone is going to come. Like that, but more powerful, and the difference now was that this someone, or something, had an evil intent. ‘Evil’ isn’t the right word either. When we are faced with certain experiences, language falls short.
I moved warily through the laundry towards the shower room. The blissful feeling of expansion I’d felt that morning evaporated, and I was now reduced to what was contained within my skin. A network of nerves and a pounding heart.
The threat didn’t diminish when I opened the door of the shower room. Quite the reverse. I reached in to switch on the light; the bulb flickered twice, then went out. I gasped and slammed the door, backing away slowly.
The crack.
An image had burned itself on my retina during those brief flickers. Something was squeezing its way out through the crack in the ceiling, directly above the bath. Since I had recently been writing about the child in the forest, the association was inevitable: it reminded me of the thing that had emerged from the child’s nose. But much, much bigger.
I stood with my back to the outside door trying to reshape the image into something else, but it continued to insist that it was what it was: a dense, black mass with the unmistakable nature of life, forcing its way out through the crack in the plaster.
I opened the door and went outside, stood beneath the blue sky. Glowing dots danced before my eyes. I rubbed my face, and when I looked at the palm of my right hand, it was streaked with red. My nose was bleeding. Only now did I become aware that what I thought of as ‘the pressure’ had been stronger than ever inside the laundry block.
*
I have no recollection of how I left the courtyard and got out into the street. I must have put down my towel and underclothes somewhere, because I wasn’t carrying them when I found myself standing outside Dekorima’s display window.
I didn’t know where to go. People passing by stared at me, and only then did I realise that the metallic taste in my mouth came from the fact that my nose was still bleeding. A small pool had formed at my feet, and the sight of the blood oozing into a crack in the pavement made me shudder. I found an old receipt in my pocket, crumpled it up until it was soft, then tore it in half and rolled it into two plugs, which I shoved up my nose. I spat on my hand and scrubbed my face clean as best I could. Then I set off.
Without thinking about where my feet were taking me, I walked down Kungsgatan towards Stureplan. Wherever I looked I saw cracks. In the facades of the buildings, in the pavement, and in people’s faces. Cracks where it could seep in.
What? What?
That was what I didn’t know, that was what frightened me, and that is what I am still investigating to this day. What it is that seeps in and what it does to us. The other, in its shifting manifestations.
I turned onto Birger Jarlsgatan, drawn by the smell of the sea from Nybroviken. My head was beginning to clear, and the cracks in people’s faces became wrinkles, mouths, eye sockets. When I reached the quayside and stood gazing out across the water, I took a deep breath and everything became a little easier.
What was it I had seen in the crack in the ceiling? Apart from its resemblance to that thing in the child’s nose, what was so frightening about it? Nothing. There was a crack in the ceiling, and something was oozing out. What did it have to do with me?
As I stood there contemplating the gently bobbing Waxholm ferries, inhaling the fresh smell of Lake Mälaren, the whole thing seemed like yet another trick played by my closed-in, overheated pressure cooker of a brain. The sun was sparkling on the water, and cheerful people on their way over to Djurgården were walking past me.
I tentatively removed the paper plugs from my nose, and discovered that I’d stopped bleeding. I tossed them in the water, and a couple of ducks immediately showed an interest. I turned back towards the city.
Okay.
Regardless of how successfully I had reduced the thing in the shower room to something that had nothing to do with me, one thing was very clear: I had no intention of standing underneath it while I took a shower. I would have to come up with an alternative plan.
When I reached Hötorget I went into John Wall, where I found a bright red thirty-litre plastic tub for seventy-nine kronor. Not even I thought I could shoplift something that big. I also paid for a sponge, and then headed home clutching my purchases.
Now that I knew the source of the pressure, I could clearly feel it emanating from the northern area of the courtyard, from the laundry block. I avoided looking in that direction and hurried up the steps to my house.
I placed the tub on the floor in front of the washbasin and sluiced myself down as best I could. I held the sponge under the tap and squeezed it over my body, then soaped my skin and repeated the procedure. It worked pretty well. At least I was clean. When I had dried myself I emptied the tub into the toilet, then spent some time staring at myself in the mirror.
After all, there was an alternative way to explain everything that was happening to me, and I searched for something in my eyes, a sign that I was losing my mind. But what does such a sign look like, and can it even be spotted by a person who is losing the plot?
I realised I was heading for another of those damned circular arguments. Enough. I was fit and clean and I smelled good. Everything would be fine, if I could just get myself a television.
*
A woman answered the phone when I rang in the afternoon. Yes, they still had the TV. Yes, I could come up and see it right now, if I so wished. Something in the way she used her words made me think that she was the one who had written the ad. Her voice was rounded, definitive, and she said ‘Third floor—it says Holmgren on the door’ as if she were providing statistical information.
I put on a white short-sleeved shirt, because I felt I was on official business. To tell the truth I was pretty nervous, because I didn’t really know how I should behave. I needn’t have worried. The woman who opened the door showed no interest in me whatsoever. She merely gave me a brief nod and said, ‘Come in.’
She was around thirty, with medium-length fair hair and clearly defined facial features. I found it difficult to concentrate on the TV she showed me, a smallish wooden box with no remote control, because a clichéd sexual fantasy had begun to play out in the back of my mind.
Young man, older woman, a TV for sale, they end up on the sofa and…
‘I expect you want to see what the picture’s like?’ she said.
As she switched on the set I heard a door open. A man about the same age as the woman came into the room, and I breathed a sigh of relief—I could abandon the fantasy. He was wearing a bathrobe, and his cropped dark hair was wet. He was exactly as good-looking as the woman. We shook hands; his grip was stronger than mine.
The picture on the TV was fine. There was a children’s program on, with figures cut out of paper making their way up a hill, dragging a plank of wood behind them. ‘Great,’ I said. ‘That’s great.’
The man asked if I’d like a beer, and I said, ‘Yes, please,’ because I assumed that was the right thing to do. The woman waved me towards an armchair that looked both new and uncomfortable. Which indeed it was. There was a highly polished glass table in front of me, with a single lily in a vase.
I looked around the room, because I had never seen anything like it in real life. It was sparsely furnished. A picture of a geometric figure hung on
the wall above the straight-backed sofa. A narrow bookcase held books that appeared to have been chosen for the colour of their spines. A square, chalk-white rug lay between the sofa and the window. It was hard to imagine that anyone actually lived there.
The only object that diverged from the carefully thought out lines and colours was the television set, which seemed as misplaced as a jukebox in an operating theatre. The woman, who had sat down in the armchair opposite me, must have noticed my expression, because she said, ‘We’ve decided to stop watching TV.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’ve decided to start.’
The woman smiled and something shifted in the room, as if a piano wire had passed through the air and sliced off a layer. Her smile wasn’t a smile. The man came in with two glasses of beer and two coasters. He placed the coasters neatly on the table before putting down the glasses, then he sat down on the sofa.
I took a sip, taking care not to spill a drop, and had to suppress the urge to knock the whole lot back in one. My hand was shaking slightly when I replaced the glass in the centre of the coaster. I rubbed my forehead, and noticed that beads of sweat had broken out along my hairline.
Pull yourself together! I thought. Calm down!
‘It’s a good TV,’ the man said. ‘We’ve had it for three years. Never had a problem with it.’
‘We haven’t watched it much,’ the woman said.
‘No, that’s true. But when we have watched it, it’s worked perfectly.’
‘It has.’
I nodded mechanically. A reasonable response would be to ask what they used to watch, but I didn’t want to know, didn’t want the conversation to carry on. I would have preferred to drop my money on the table, grab the TV and run down the stairs, like an animal returning to its lair with its prey. I realised that my impulses were socially unacceptable, and that I had to say something, so I asked, ‘Have you lived here long?’
‘Seven years,’ the man replied.
‘Our first home together.’