I dried myself with a towel that smelled musty, and decided that the only reasonable explanation was that there was something in the shower room. Something that had forced its way out of the crack, something that caused the birds to fall from the sky, and made the neighbours uncooperative, because they wanted to keep it for themselves.
But what? What?
The question continued to occupy my mind as I unloaded the machine and distributed the clothes between two tumble dryers to speed things up. There was a silent, watchful presence behind my back. Something that wanted me, for some reason. I tugged at the padlock, but the bar was bolted to the door and impossible to force without proper tools. I gave up and went back to my house, where I tried to come up with some suitable patter to accompany the trick known as Invisible Palm.
At one-thirty I returned to the laundry room and retrieved my clothes. I was just cleaning one of the filters when the outside door opened. I closed the dryer and stood there with a ball of fluff clutched in my fist.
The person who walked in with a laundry basket under his arm was the smartly dressed man who had said it was nice to see a light on in my house in the evenings. He didn’t notice me, because his eyes were fixed on the shower room door. It would be an exaggeration to say that he was looking scruffy, but in comparison to his previous standard, he had deteriorated. Several strands of hair were sticking out, his shirt was creased, and he had dirt under the fingernails of his right hand, which was wrapped in a bandage.
I cleared my throat and he gave a start, as if I had interrupted an internal dialogue. Something in his eyes made me focus on his forehead as I said, ‘Hello again.’
‘I’m sorry, do we know one another?’
‘I live in the house over there.’
He appeared to be retrieving information from an archive right at the back of his mind, and something of the deep glow in his eyes disappeared as he said, ‘Oh, yes, of course. How’s it going?’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Although I no longer have a shower.’ I nodded at the padlock.
The man glanced at the door and pursed his lips. I ventured a step further, and asked, ‘Do you know what’s happened?’
He widened his eyes and shook his head, a gesture so obviously false that the needle on a lie detector would have gone crazy. It’s possible to untangle small lies, but big lies are knots so tightly tied that you need an axe to undo them. I took out my axe and got straight to the point: ‘What are you actually doing in here? What’s in the shower room?’
The man put his finger to his lips and hissed: ‘Sssh! Sssh!’ He glanced at his laundry basket. I was about to push him harder, when he suddenly yelled, ‘Get out of here! Get out of here! You’re young! Get out of here!’
‘What does the fact that I’m young have to do with…’
The man waved his hand in the air as if to add weight to his words, ‘Get out of here! Just do as I say!’
We stood there staring at one another, then I picked up my IKEA bag and headed for the door. As I passed the man I looked down into his basket. The clothes that had been folded last time were now in a heap, although they didn’t look dirty.
Something glinted at the bottom of the basket. The clothes were only there to hide the fact that the man had brought a knife with him, a knife he had glanced at when I started to question him. I decided it was best to leave it for now.
I gave him a nod as I walked out, but he just stood there with trembling lips and refused to look at me.
*
Before I started to sort out my life, my existence had resembled that of a jellyfish. The currents carried me wherever they wished, and external impulses were immediately transmitted to the very heart of me. This amoeba-like tendency remained, but I was fighting it. I refused to allow the incident in the laundry block to take over my thoughts, but instead stuck to my plan for the day. I gathered up my publicity material, my magic paraphernalia and my list of addresses. My first port of call was the Mona Lisa restaurant on Birger Jarlsgatan, a mid-range Italian place.
What kind of person do you have to be to sell yourself? It’s a question of promising too much and painting a glowing picture of how things will be if someone decides to hire you. I have never had that skill; instead I prefer to deliver a gloomy prognosis, suggesting that the ship is more than likely to sink with me at the helm. It went against my nature to show off and promise success.
And yet it had to be done, because I really, really wanted to do magic. I loved magic. The moment of amazement when the audience’s grasp of reality is called into question, when the object that was here has in some impossible way ended up there. Those priceless seconds before they ask themselves, ‘So how did he do that?’—the seconds when magic actually exists.
I headed for Birger Jarlsgatan through the Brunkeberg Tunnel, giving myself a good talking-to and trying to think positively. Twenty metres into the tunnel I felt as if something was trying to get inside my head, like another person’s distant voice when you’re in a deep sleep. I stopped and tried to work out which direction it was coming from.
I pinned it down to a section of the rock face, and then, picturing it from above, I worked out that the shower room must be directly behind it. Only a few metres of the Brunkeberg Ridge separated me from whatever was in there. There was no sign of anyone else in the tunnel, so I went over and laid my hand and my cheek on the cold surface of the rock.
At the risk of appearing inconsistent, I must revise my earlier reference to sleep. It was as if I myself was fully alert, yet a dream was trying to penetrate my consciousness by osmosis. A sleeper calling to someone who was awake. The image that came into my mind was as fragile as a butterfly’s wing, but it glowed with absolute clarity.
I was sitting in a shabby, comfortable armchair. On my knee sat a young man in Doc Martens, jeans with turned-up cuffs, and a bomber jacket. His head was shaved. A skinhead. In his eyes I could see latent violence but also a certain intelligence.
It was as if I had been split in two. The larger part of me was standing with my cheek resting on a cold, damp wall of rock, while the remainder was in the armchair with the skinhead’s considerable weight pressing down on my thighs. My right hand appeared in my mind’s eye. It was wrapped in a bandage, and there was dirt under my fingernails. I was the smartly dressed man who was no longer quite so smart.
My hand tenderly caressed the skinhead’s cheek. He looked into my eyes and gave me a smile filled with love, then leaned forward and hugged me. I felt his arms around my neck, heard the rustle of the bomber jacket as he held me close. His cheek touched mine and then there was nothing but the cold rock. The image was gone.
I stood there in the tunnel blinking, whole once more. I thought I understood two things. First of all, I had been given a glimpse into the smartly dressed man’s fantasy. Secondly, the reality of that fantasy was probably considerably more powerful when it wasn’t impeded by a two-metre thick wall of rock.
I am not in the habit of judging people, yet I found the dream quite repulsive. If I was forced to choose the kind of person I least wanted to snuggle up with, a skinhead would be pretty high on the list. I had encountered gangs of them a few times when I was performing street magic in the Old Town, and they really hadn’t come across as being particularly cuddly.
Footsteps echoed through the tunnel from the direction of Östermalm. I detached myself from the wall and began to walk. After about thirty metres I met a guy with a sunbed tan in a yellow T-shirt so tight it made his bulging muscles look like a physical deformity. When he had gone past I turned around, curious as to whether he would react to the scene pouring out of the wall, or if I would be the only one to experience it.
I saw him slow down, like someone who thinks they can hear their name being called from far away. But he didn’t stop, and within a couple of metres he was marching along purposefully once more, his meaty thighs swishing against one another, arms swinging. I guessed that, unlike me, he didn’t concern himself with anything formless and
difficult to comprehend. I carried on towards Birger Jarlsgatan.
*
The Mona Lisa restaurant had opened so recently that it wasn’t in the phone book, but it had come to my attention through posters stuck up here and there. I didn’t know whether its newness was a good thing or not; no doubt it depended on the owner, as usual.
When I pushed open the door I was informed by a man in a white shirt and black trousers that unfortunately lunch was over and they would be open again at five. He was vacuuming away, and I got the impression that lunch hadn’t been particularly busy; only one table bore any trace of customers.
‘That’s not why I’m here,’ I said. ‘Would it be possible to have a word with the owner?’
The man straightened up and his expression changed as he switched from one role to another. ‘That’s me,’ he said. ‘What’s it about?’ I too changed from someone making a general enquiry to experienced entertainer. I walked towards the man holding out my hand, so that our new characters could meet.
‘My name is John Lindqvist. I’m a magician.’
The man shook my hand and raised his coarse, dark eyebrows. It seemed likely that he really did come from Italian stock. He was around forty years old, with a short, compact physique and eyes that looked cunning, friendly and tired. A charmer who was past his prime, or a mummy’s boy with unfulfilled ambitions.
‘Roberto,’ he said; his hand was small but surprisingly strong. ‘A magician?’
‘Yes. Or rather an entertainer who does magic. Can you spare a few minutes?’
Roberto shrugged, and we sat down opposite one another at a table. I showed him my credentials and my testimonial letters; I swept my arm around the room, visualising an evening with every table packed; and I explained how my magic could entertain customers while they were waiting for their food, or how it could be the icing on the cake at the end of a successful evening.
Roberto’s gaze was distant, and I hoped he was lost in contemplation of the image I had conjured up. Maybe it was just the thought of a full restaurant that appealed to him, or maybe it was the whole package. He scratched the back of his neck and said, ‘I don’t know. How much are you asking for?’
This was the third time I had managed to get to this point, and I assured him that I would be happy with forty kronor an hour, plus tips. Pitching so low might have been a mistake, because Roberto frowned as if he smelled a rat. ‘Forty?’
‘Yes,’ I said, correcting any possible miscalculation by adding: ‘To start with. Then we can see how it goes. If it’s a success, we can renegotiate.’
Roberto’s expression cleared and he nodded. Once again he looked around the room as if he was finding it difficult to picture the scene I had described. Then he asked the devastating question, the one I knew would come up sooner or later: ‘Have you done this before? At another restaurant?’
I had considered lying, even faking a letter from some non-existent restaurant, but it was far too easy to check up on that kind of thing, and if I was caught out, my chances of performing would be zero. The word might even spread among restaurant owners, warning each other to look out for a con artist going around asking for a job.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not in a restaurant, but I’ve done several hundred performances in front of an audience.’
I didn’t mention the fact that at least ninety-five per cent of those performances had been in the street, in front of an audience that dispersed faster than it gathered. Roberto sat in silence for a while, his chin resting on his hand. I expected him to tell me he wasn’t interested, but his words were a fraction more encouraging: ‘So what exactly is it that you do?’
I am no longer a member of the Swedish Magic Circle, so I can’t be thrown out. And yet the magician’s etiquette remains, and it forces me to paraphrase words that might reveal the secret. I pretended to search my jacket pockets and hid the gimmick in my hand, then asked, ‘Do you have a ten-kronor note?’
Roberto took out his wallet and handed me a note.
‘Okay,’ I said, folding it up in preparation. ‘If I really was a magician, if I really could do magic…what would you want me to do with this ten-kronor note?’
Roberto thought for a moment, then much to my relief he gave the right answer—the one around sixty per cent of people give: ‘Turn it into a hundred.’
I pretended to be worried at the prospect of this challenging task. Roberto folded his arms and leaned back, pleased at his own cleverness in putting me on the spot. I folded the note in the way I had practised so often, talking all the while about the difficulty of making something look like something else, but how, in the manner of an origami expert, I would try to make his ten-kronor note at least resemble a hundred.
The arms that Roberto had folded so confidently dropped to his sides and his smile disappeared from his lips as I opened out the hundred-kronor note and placed it on the table in front of him. Though I now risked going home ninety kronor down, I allowed him to pick it up and examine it. Fortunately he put it down again, and I was able to repeat the trick in reverse, explaining that the resemblance had now passed and he could have his ten kronor back.
The momentary confusion had lasted a few seconds longer than average in Roberto’s case, but now the original note was on the table in front of him he asked the inevitable question: ‘How the hell did you do that?’
I gave a modest shrug. ‘Practice. And a little bit of magic.’
There was a brief silence, then Roberto said, ‘Okay.’
‘Okay, what?’
‘Okay, you can do your magic here. We’ll give it a go.’
My heart started pounding and I had to make a real effort to keep my voice steady as I said, as indifferently as possible, ‘Great. When do you want me to start?’
We talked for a while and I forced myself to nod and murmur in agreement rather than jumping up and dancing around, waving my hands in the air. We agreed that he would put up a poster and insert a note in the menu announcing that from six o’clock on Thursday evening—in three days’ time—the multi-talented award-winning magician John Lindqvist would be performing magic to entertain and amaze the clientele at Mona Lisa.
It was four o’clock by the time we stood up and shook hands. We exchanged phone numbers and wished each other all the best until we met again on Thursday.
When I stepped out onto Birger Jarlsgatan, the city had changed completely, as if a telescopic lens had been switched for a wide-angle. Buildings that had seemed flat and nondescript a little while ago were now three-dimensional and full of elaborate detail, while the people passing by were no longer extras but leading characters, each one involved in a drama of their own.
I dared to see the world as diverse and full of promise because at long last I was on the way to taking my place within it, to becoming someone. John Lindqvist, magician and entertainer at the Mona Lisa Restaurant!
*
I didn’t want to go back through the Brunkeberg Tunnel; in fact I didn’t even want to go home. In a burst of lightheartedness I went into the Rigoletto and bought a ticket for Rambo: First Blood Part II. It was showing in one of the smaller cinemas in the basement, and I was all alone as I allowed myself to wallow in the images of Stallone racing around, killing people and blowing things up. I watched but didn’t really see, because I was busy redefining my role in life.
By the time I emerged onto Kungsgatan as dusk was gathering, another veil had fallen from my eyes, and everything was so clear. The rigid, sprayed hairstyles bobbing by enveloped me in a wash of phthalates that made me feel nauseous. All my senses were on full alert, and the world seemed almost unbearably rich in detail. To get home faster and avoid too many faces, I went up the steps to Malmskillnadsgatan and then down to Tunnelgatan.
I hurried across the courtyard without even glancing at the laundry block, and when I had closed my door behind me I let out a long sigh. I didn’t feel tired or trapped as I had on other days; on the contrary, I was fulfilled, I was happy, I was happening, and I
felt like sweeping everything off my desk to start working on a new act right away.
I pulled myself together, though. I tidied away newspapers and cups, my notepad and pens. Wiped the desk with the dishcloth. Then I methodically set out my close-up mat and magic paraphernalia. I was about to sit down, then I remembered I would be standing up when I performed.
I replaced the desk with a restaurant table, turned the bookcase into five or six expectant faces looking up at me. I tossed three coins between my hands and said, ‘Hi, my name is John Lindqvist. Through intensive practice I’ve learned how to teleport coins through my blood vessels…’
I went over Daryl’s Elbow, Knee and Neck many times, changing my patter so that it flowed more smoothly, practising the movements and facial expressions, bowing to acknowledge imaginary applause and feeling happier than I had for a long time.
*
I don’t remember much about what I did during those three days, apart from practising. Oh yes, one thing: one afternoon when my fingers were stiff after hours of manipulation and my head was spinning from the sound of my own voice, I took myself off to the City Library to read up about the Brunkeberg Tunnel.
My fingers had softened and my head had quietened down as I walked along the rows of books about Stockholm, running my hand along their spines. It took me half an hour to amass the following information from a range of sources.
The tunnel had been excavated between 1884 and 1886 under the leadership of Knut Lindmark, who had achieved great success with the Katarina Lift a couple of years earlier. His aim was to make it easier for the residents of Stockholm to travel between different parts of the city. For a fee, of course.
The construction of the tunnel turned out to be a more difficult and more expensive project. There were serious complications on the west side, the side where I lived, because the walls repeatedly collapsed. Lindmark overcame the problem by hiring ridiculously expensive machines from England that ran all night, freezing the water in the unstable rock so that a small amount could be excavated the following day, until the water thawed and the machines had to be started up again.